Robin LaMer Rahija Deconstructs Poetry with Dark Humor in “Inside Out Egg” [INTERVIEW]

Robin: “I get that question often, and I never really… well, how to answer it. I think it’s important to maybe approach it without trying to be funny at first. I think poets are always looking for a different stance on everyday life and interactions. Sometimes, you come across something that’s just absolutely absurd, and just writing it down makes it funny.

“But editing is important for that. What’s funny to me isn’t always funny or absurd to other people. It’s important to have different people read it and get their take on it. It’s really about finding the things that make you laugh yourself.”

James: Yeah, it starts there, and then feedback plays a different role than it does in critiquing poetry, in the craft of it and the language. There’s actually the response that is important on top of all of that.

Robin: “Yeah, I tell people sometimes I only actually have one joke that I tell over and over again, which is: how long can I get you to think I’m not telling a joke?”

James: The cover of “Inside Out Egg” is terrific, almost a concrete poem formed from headline cut outs forming an egg silhouette. I interviewed songwriter Daniel Ash, from the bands Bauhaus and Love & Rockets, last year and he spoke about using a William Burroughs cut out method of using headlines literally cut out of magazines for lines in his lyrics. What role did found poetry play, if any, in crafting the poems in this book? 

Robin: “Oh yeah, big time. I’m a big fan of erasure and the history of erasure. I think it’s one of the most impactful deconstructionist movements in poetry, where you take any material and manipulate it to the poet’s will, which is great.

“So, the Breaking News poems that you mentioned—there’s a bunch of those sprinkled throughout the book. They’re almost 100% stolen from Yahoo News. I don’t know if the kids out there know what Yahoo is, but I still have a Yahoo email address. Every once in a while, I have to go check it, and there’s a site on Yahoo called Yahoo News. It’s the most sensationalist, clickbait nonsense. Nothing important is on there, but it’s all rhetoric designed to seem urgent, to get you to click on it or buy something.

“And yeah, those are sprinkled throughout the book, kind of trying to mimic the experience of being on the internet or just being distracted by constant media bombardment. It’s about moving through the world without a clear sense of what’s important and what’s nonsense. So, those headlines are almost directly stolen from Yahoo News—not all of them, but I won’t tell you which ones are fake.”

James: It’s almost like, “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!”—which one’s the real story and which one’s fake?

Robin: “Yes, exactly like that. They all seem sort of absurd, but that one about the bird? That was a real headline.”

James: Drilling down on the nine “Breaking News” short poems which open and anchor the first half of the book, were these always separate poems or start as a single poem that made more sense broken up as the book took shape? 

Robin: “They actually did start as one poem, just sort of broken up into four or five headlines. But the thing about having a project like that, or a structure like that, is once you start, you kind of can’t stop. Every headline seems like, ‘Oh, that will make a good poem.’ And then you tell your friends about it, and they start sending you absurd headlines too. So, it just kept getting longer and longer, and it made more sense to break them up.

“I feel like they’re better taken as little individual nuggets rather than grouped together into a single poem.”

James: I think it works very effectively. I mean, I could see it as one poem, but in the context of a book, having it spread throughout is almost like a palate cleanser between the poems. It works really effectively to break things up.

Robin: “Yeah, and they kind of take the seriousness out of some of the other poems in the book. I think that’s probably a product of my personality, where I can never take myself seriously for too long.”

James: “Halloween: Ends” and “Future Food” are both effective examples of list poems. In this series of interviews I don’t recall ever asking about the list poem form and I’m curious how you approached the editing and revision process, getting the balance of too much / too little just right, and selecting the first and last elements in the list.

Robin: “There can definitely be different ways to go about it. Starting in the concrete world is a good place to begin, and then with each item in the list, you can start to veer off in more extreme directions if that’s where you want to take it.

“The ‘Halloween: Ends’ list has a kind of narrative to it. It’s a little hard to explain without just reading the poem, but Michael Myers sort of has this journey throughout, and you learn about that journey through the items in the list. So, that one had a more structured, narrative organization.

“But I do like to—kind of as part of my ‘How long can I get you to think I’m not joking’ approach—start in the concrete world and then stretch the poem, seeing how far I can take it into different areas.”

James: The poem “I Can Never Put a Bird in a Poem because my Name is Robin and that is NOT Fair”, and that’s a fantastic title, is constructed from a series of loosely connected and numbered short poems. In III you wrote: 

Back then I lied about the bruise.
A visiting artist had tried to use me
like a rudder
like he was the captain 
of my kitchen.
Of my own goddamn kitchen.
The walls were white
and lined with knives.
I suppose that was
my first mistake.

That’s one of several chilling passages that sneak up on you in this poem. How did you approach constructing and editing this poem? Where did it begin and how did you know it was complete? 

Robin: “Definitely, that title is kind of a joke, but also, you know, it’s a joke about poetry itself, which I think a lot of the poems in the book are. That poem came out of a project a friend of mine, Mikey Swanberg—another poet—and I were doing. We had really gotten into haikus and were sending each other a haiku every day. We did that for a long time.

“Then one day he was like, ‘We need to expand our horizons,’ so he created this form called the century, which is a 100-line poem. It’s really hard, especially if you’ve been used to writing short poems for a long time. The challenge was to sustain an idea or thought for 100 lines—it’s almost impossible!

“I think that was the first century poem I wrote, and it set the tone for the whole book. It has this erratic, jumping-around feel, pulling thoughts in different directions. It worked well in that form. They were all written as one poem, but I broke them into sections that made sense.”

James: I happened to be in flight when I re-read “Inside Out Egg” and enjoyed the experience of re-reading “Transivity”, a poem grounded in the experience of being in flight. You wrote:

Near the end
some passengers flip faster
through their magazines
but some of us reach up
in a hush
almost as one
to click off our tiny lights
and lock ourselves
to the window to wait
for the glitter of terra firma

What is your approach to editing an experience or image or idea in poetry in the fewest possible words, something you do very effectively in this book? 

Robin: “I definitely hate flying, but it’s one of those things that is so normal that there’s almost no point in complaining about it. But it does affect us emotionally, often in very real ways.

“As for the succinctness or terseness of my writing, I’ve gotten asked about that before. I’m not really sure where it comes from, except for this totally unfounded belief that fewer words are better. I don’t know where I got that idea, or why it’s stuck with me for so long. Obviously, there are great poems with long lines and lots of words, but it might have started with my very first poetry workshop with a poet named Michelle Boisseau. She was so adamant about crafting the line, making it as perfect as possible with no wasted words. That’s probably where my brain always goes first.”

James: The closing poem “So Many” is one of my favorites in the collection, and a perfect way to end the book. How did you approach the challenge of selecting and ordering the poems in this collection? 

Robin: “I tried multiple tactics, and there are probably fifteen different versions of the book with different orders. This is my first book, which is always kind of weird because I wrote some of those poems a decade ago, or maybe even more. It’s hard to align your past self with the current stuff you’re writing.

“The best thing I did was hire a consultant to look at it and give feedback, because when you’re at that stage, all the poems feel so close to you. This was a total stranger, which was great, because while I have my writing community, they know me too well. She was able to say, ‘This doesn’t make sense here, but this does,’ and that really helped. I didn’t take everything she said, but it allowed me to see it in a new light, which was super helpful.

“I tend to lean toward a more morose, sarcastic, pessimistic attitude, so I knew I wanted to counteract that and end the book on a more hopeful, positive note.”

James: I think your use of humor helps with that, because even when the humor is dark, it allows you to see the darkness but not get trapped in it. Getting that balance right is really tricky.

Robin: “Well, thank you. I think that’s a metaphor for how we live our lives, right? We’re trying to joke ourselves out of being overwhelmed by the void. Stand-up comedians, for example, typically have pretty dark backgrounds and are fighting that darkness. They’re very effective at using humor, even though under the surface, many of them have pretty dark backstories.

“It’s interesting how something that makes you laugh out loud can be rooted in something so heavy. It seems counterintuitive, but it works for me, I guess.”

James: My formal education is in technology and I’ve been tempted to pursue an MFA at some point. What advice do you have for getting the most out of an MFA program?

Robin: “I do have an MFA, but I was a little older when I went to get it. I actually started a PhD in literature—literary criticism—but I just couldn’t take it and dropped out after about four years, which was kind of devastating.

“I think it’s good to wait until you’re a little older, have had some experiences, tried some things, and reached a point where you feel like you’ve burned all your bridges, have nothing to look forward to, and are desperate for some direction. Then, getting an MFA doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. But really, I think most people in the history of humanity didn’t have MFAs and still became great writers. So, you don’t actually need one.

“It was good for me at the time because I didn’t have a job, and they paid me to teach, which was great. I met a lot of great poets, and it really is about community building. I’m a first-generation college student, first-generation grad school too, so I didn’t know some things that are useful, like networking, going to conferences, meeting people, and figuring out how to get your foot in the door for what you want to do.

“But you really need to hang on to that one goal, which is to become the best poet or writer you can be. Don’t go to grad school expecting people to tell you you’re already great, and don’t go thinking you’ll get a job teaching poetry—because you probably won’t.

“It has to be about the craft. You really have to appreciate the act of writing. You have to be a process person, not a product person. The book I finished at the end of my MFA program? I never looked at it again, and none of those poems made it into my first book. But the act of doing it, of having deadlines, of writing a poem a week—that’s crazy and not sustainable—but it’s an intense two years. It was good for me, for sure, though it’s not for everyone.”

Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.