Interview with AM Ringwalt on The Wheel by Vasantha Sambamurti
Photo by Hannah Hall
I would love to hear more about the development of the ideas that came to be born as this book. Could you talk about the role your influences played in the creation of this work? Tarot, divination, Merwin’s translation of Dante, and so much beautiful music (including your own!). In what ways were these elements speaking to you and to each other?
“Through all of this movement, and all of this thinking about movement, my questions about poetry became physical, theatrical.”
Many of the ideas that became and sustained The Wheel originated while I was attending the International Summer Program at the Watermill Center in 2017. That summer, I lived alongside forty or so artists of all disciplines while we supported the development of new performances by Robert Wilson. We also had the opportunity to create new works and performances with each other. My closest friend from Watermill, someone who remains a long-time collaborator, is a choreographer and scenographer named Cinthya Oyervides. With Cinthya, I began an enduring exploration of poetry’s propensity to be choreographic as well as a broader exploration of embodiment. We participated in Tai Chi movement workshops as well as physical and durational performances. Through all of this movement, and all of this thinking about movement, my questions about poetry became physical, theatrical. Texts were no longer isolated, self-contained vessels. Texts spoke to each other—texts sounded and moved—and it was my task to discern these connections, disconnections and resonances through time and space.
By the time I began writing The Wheel, two years after Watermill, my ideas were steadily transforming into theories of relationality in texts, songs and symbols. I saw tarot, translation and music as sites of divination, and wanted to explore how I could develop a set of symbols from my own life to support my personal healing from PTSD—just as tarot turned mundane playing cards into tools for divining. And as I read Merwin’s translation of Purgatorio and listened to the songs cited throughout my writing, often on loop, I paid most attention to what language and sounds got stuck in my head, when these sounds came forth from my subconscious—what meaning was embedded in these moments, what healing or vigilance these moments demanded from me.
During the launch of The Wheel, you spoke about how travel puts you in a “hyper-absorptive & creative state.” So much of this book concerns the circumstances and consequences of transit, across the United States, Rome, and through psychic contours rendered as geography. How did you maintain a sense of focus (perhaps, poetic focus) throughout the creative flux of movement?
A question arose—in my own life as well as regarding the craft of The Wheel—through my drafting and re-drafting processes: where am I going?
I wrote The Wheel in real time, as its events were unfurling (or turning)—spanning a breakup, a reunion, an ex’s suicide and a spell of oscillating grief and disassociation—so I wrote from a place of genuine curiosity. Where am I going? became How do I move through this? When do I get to rest? When do I give myself relief? How can the book perform moments of relief? It was all I could do.
“I pictured the movement of The Wheel, of my movement, as a literal wheel—moving forward and backward, healing and regressing and trudging forward in spite of it all in pursuit of more healing.”
In the early weeks of writing, I quickly realized that my grandfather served as a kind of narrative relief. Recalling him also relieved whatever pain I was experiencing in the moment. By accident, I fell into a compassion-based meditation, one that allowed me to keep moving through the hurt. I also learned how to rest through this accidental meditation, which was essential to my sense of focus as well as my well-being.
Throughout my early 20s, I was in flight mode as a trauma response. Your question makes me laugh—I was, of course, also literally driving and flying from Boston to Dublin to South Bend to Corona del Mar to Rome, to name just a few places, and writing through these geographic movements. In flight mode, I was a relative hermit, performing extroversion when necessary but largely fearful of social settings and spaces/people that reminded me of my trauma. I needed some form of connection, of course, and that came through relatively solitary travel—literally connecting spaces.
I pictured the movement of The Wheel, of my movement, as a literal wheel—moving forward and backward, healing and regressing and trudging forward in spite of it all in pursuit of more healing. The tarot reading that catalyzed this whole project—the tarot reading at my grandparents’ home and thanks to my dear friend Saoli who drove from L.A. to visit us—yielded the upside-down-wheel. Saoli said, in response to my question—how am I going to move forward?—that I should allow things to evolve as they should. I kept this moment of divination in mind as I wrote, trusting that the poetic focus was the flux. That, through inhabiting the flux, I’d learn to be.
You’ve written quite extensively on the role of referentiality in poetry and citational poetics. Could you speak to how these ideas informed the development of your text?
In “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde writes of “learning to bear the intimacy of scrutiny”—an active process of discerning what “feels right.” For Lorde, this is an “ancient, black, non-european” act. This is where clarity comes from. Referentiality in poetry, or what I call citational poetics, is the “quality of light” that guides my writing-as-reflection of feeling, the light that shapes my language. I am indebted to Lorde for articulating this truly transformative activity. Citational poetics—where deliberate movement with other voices pushes the writer beyond their self and into some kind of otherwise nonexistent sociality—is a performance of such intimate scrutiny.
Every day, I have to actively figure out what “feels right,” what feels safe. This act is essential, to varying degrees of intensity—necessitating more or less energy depending upon one’s race, gender identity, sexuality, physical ability, mental health and socioeconomic status. My scrutiny is what keeps me safe, what creates the space for my healing. Much of this scrutiny is amplified, too, by solidarity and conversation in community. So, I am most drawn to texts that understand this sense of community, and that seek to embody it in some way through their literary forms. In The Wheel, this takes the shape of an invitation: I need you to listen with me.
I have witnessed Lorde’s intimate scrutiny in many of the inspirations for The Wheel: Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, Chris Kraus’ Aliens & Anorexia, Wendy Eisenberg’s Auto. That being said, of course my writing is referential. I’m not alone. I don’t want my voice to stand as the only voice. The question that Notley poses in “Women and Poetry,” the question that catalyzed my Citational Poetics series—What is it like at the beginning of the world?—calls for scrutiny against racial capitalism, against patriarchy, and for a movement—for me—to the stream. In The Wheel, I quote my therapist: “What does it feel like to be in the stream?” This is where I feel safest.
Writing is a process of excavation, one that can be both parts painful and cathartic in revealing what’s buried. In what ways does your writing navigate these oscillations of pain and catharsis? How does writing and art function as a form of active healing?
I love that you specifically used the word “excavation.” I’m thinking, now, of Walter Benjamin’s “Excavation and Memory.” In it, he writes:
Epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through.
In writing towards a specific image—a moving image—of myself remembering, I get to reclaim myself. That’s how I relate to myself. There’s pain and catharsis in that. My writing navigates these oscillations because I have to if I want to survive. My writing is motivated by memory, not trauma.
Writing, for me, is an act of repetition guided by—or in pursuit of—memory. Repetition can be healing, insofar as it renders something—anything—symbolic. Now, when I see the word bell I feel calm. When I see any of the symbols I write towards in The Wheel, I feel closer to myself. My favorite poem is Alice Notley’s “Malorum Sanatio.” Some variation of the word “heal” appears in the poem 44 times. I’ve been reading a lot of books about recovery lately, and I’ve learned that the act of writing reaches the subconscious in a way that other acts—like thinking—might fall short of, or require more of. So, I think if someone is writing about healing—like Notley, who writes “No one gets out of here unhealed”—they’re enacting that process while perhaps leading others that way, too.
You credit your time spent at the University of Notre Dame’s MFA for the completion of this project. In what ways did your time in MFA most meaningfully influence the trajectory of your work?
First off, developing my poetry thesis and studying with the support of Joyelle McSweeney was so fundamental to my writing and thinking. Her encouragement to write about my writing likely led me to the realm of citational poetics. The schedule of the MFA also allowed me to tour my music for the first time ever, which I write about in The Wheel. Throughout my two years in and around South Bend, I read a bunch of Alfred Starr Hamilton and made a few precious friends and spent most of my free time walking around thinking about memory and symbolism. In every sense, it was a time of growth.
I was very lucky to receive a grant to research symbolism in tarot and the Divine Comedy at Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway, which is the true starting point of The Wheel. I drafted this work after spending close to twenty rich days in Rome in January 2019; Steve Tomasula graciously allowed a nonfiction writer into his fiction workshop, and that space kept me writing. Finally, and still-bewilderingly, I received a post-graduate fellowship called the Sparks Prize to read and write prose for an entire year. This prize truly changed my life. I stopped my flight—I moved to Nashville to be with my now-husband, I revised The Wheel and saw it accepted for publication just days before our wedding, and I’ve learned (and am learning) how to be still in community.
You can read Sambamurti’s review of The Wheel here.
AM Ringwalt is a writer and musician. The author of The Wheel (Spuyten Duyvil), her work appears in Jacket2, Washington Square Review and Bennington Review. The recipient of the 2019 Sparks Prize as a graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA in Poetry program, she teaches writing at Belmont University, the Porch and Interlochen Center for the Arts, and is a contributing blogger for Action Books. She has performed her music as Anne Malin at the Watermill Center, the New Yorker Festival and with Third Man Records. Waiting Song is her most recent record.
