An Interview with Gabrielle Bates

S. Tremaine Nelson

I first saw Gabrielle Bates’ name next to the name of Dujie Tahat, whose poem “All-American Ghazal” appeared in our Fall 2020 issue. Along with the poet Luther Hughes, Dujie and Gabrielle co-host a Seattle-based podcast called “The Poet Salon,” in which poets talk over drinks prepared especially for them. I reached out to Gabrielle because I read that she had grown up in the Deep South, only to leave home for the Pacific Northwest, whereas I myself had grown up in the Pacific Northwest, only to leave home for Nashville, Tennessee. The Pacific Northwest and the South, for me, could not have been more differently — culturally, geographically, politically, and artistically. Gabrielle shared some of her own experience about making that same trip but in the opposite direction. Just a few weeks after I reached out to her, I saw that her poem “In the Dream in Which I Am a Widow” had been published in The New Yorker. It was her second poem in the magazine. About her first time being published in the The New Yorker, she wrote on her blog: “The really do accept poems from the slush pile (even when you’re not famous).”

Northwest Review: How would you describe the “sound” of the Pacific Northwest?
Gabrielle Bates: On a daily basis from my apartment on the Hill in Seattle I hear buzz saws and hammers, occasional shouting, overlapping calls of crows and seagulls, and whatever music the record store down the block is playing, which spills out onto the street. When I think of the Pacific Northwest as a region, my brain fills, however, with softer sounds: waves lapping, the almost imperceptible sound of a stick being pressed into moss.
NWR: What is the principal difference, as an artist, in living and working in the Pacific Northwest as opposed to the American South?
GB: After graduating from undergrad at Auburn University, I moved north and west, and I’ve been based in Seattle ever since. I’m lucky to get to come back and visit the American South (specifically Birmingham, Alabama) for stretches of time, but never for long enough to know what it would really feel like to live and make art here full-time. Because Seattle is four times the size of Birmingham and Seattle residents have much more wealth, per capita, and access to higher education, generally, than people in Birmingham, there are many more resources for writers and lovers of literature here — lots of reading series, literary nonprofits, grants for artists. The abundance blew my mind, when I first moved.
NWR: Who are the poets working today you admire the most?
GB: I’m a serial admirer, so I’ll limit my answer to a few folks in the Seattle area, otherwise it’ll take me a month. In Seattle, I hugely admire Luther Hughes, for the way he supports communities in need while also writing some of the sexiest poems ever in the history of poetry; Dujie Tahat, for the way they invent, dismantle, and reconfigure poetic forms; Erin McCoy, whose dense thickets of sound astonish me on a weekly basis (I’m very lucky to be in a workshop with her, as well as the beloved, multi-talented Patrycja Humienik, another Seattle-based poet I admire hugely); Quenton Baker, Pulitzer Prize winner of my mind, for showing me that rigorous engagement with research and theory does not have to come at the expense of deep feeling; Abi Pollokoff, whose poems are oceanic spells I could drift through for days in awe; Rachel Edelman, for her stamina and standards when it comes to revision and her engagement with Southernness in poems; Rick Barot, for clarity; Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, for her tender and fiery way, on and off the page; so many others.
NWR: Does “Southern Literature” really exist, or is that merely a marketing phrase?
GB: Any literature written by someone from the South is, for me, Southern Literature. The arms of that phrase wrap around a remarkably varied, complex collection of books and poems and essays and hybrid experiments. My impression is that the aesthetic and thematic associations I and many others typically bring to the category (gothic, grotesque, God-haunted) comes from the work of white, canonized figures in fiction like Faulkner and O’Connor, the humid climate and vine-snared landscapes, and the living legacy of enslavement and anti-Black terrorism in the region. When I started writing poetry, I went in search of Southern poets — literary ancestors, in whose lineage I could orient myself — and while I couldn’t find many poetry ancestors from the Deep South, I did find a ton of stunning contemporaries: C.D. Wright (who was alive at the time), Nikky Finney, Rickey Laurentiis, Tiana Clark, Jericho Brown, Natasha Trethewey, Rachel Edelman, Jerriod Avant, Faylita Hicks, Terrance Hayes . . .
NWR: As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, I was taught about the legacy–both pros and cons–of the Agrarian Poets, the Fugitive Poets, and their lasting impact on Southern Literature, for better or worse: do you consider your work a part of any historical poetic tradition?
GB: I wish I’d been taught anything about the Fugitive-Agrarian Poets when I was in college! I don’t remember discussing historic poetic traditions at all, in any way, in any of my classes, aside from the Modernists. It’s funny, I often hear writers of all kinds buck against being named as part of a particular tradition — they seem repelled by the idea of being siloed or defined — and I understand that it can feel flattening or limiting to bear a label, but I think, personally, it would be a huge honor to be regarded as part of a larger collective that shares aesthetic proclivities, ambitions, or questions.
NWR: It rains, you know, all the time in Seattle, whereas the rain in Alabama arrives with a bit more violence and intensity, perhaps: has this difference in climate, along with any others, (perhaps the heat?) influenced your literary habits and observations?
GB: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fact that Alabama has the most underground rivers of any state and how, if my poems were bodies of water, they would be that. When I can feel something powerful and cold rushing beneath a seemingly still surface: that’s when I know I might have a poem. I also think it’s true that the humidity of the air in Alabama makes me more attune to the physicality of the unseen, generally. Histories, personal and public. Secrets. The dead.
NWR: Does American country music inform your poetry at all? If so, do you have a favorite country music singer?
GB: As an adolescent in Alabama, I did not like the country music I heard on the radio at all. I was ashamed of the twang (which I was actively trying to expunge from my own mouth), embarrassed by the corniness of the storytelling, repulsed by the white man machismo and American nationalism. When my dad was sad after a divorce, he played a lot of country music around the house, primarily by women, and I liked that OK, but I would rarely admit it. I had a soft spot for The Chicks, Dolly Parton, and Patsy Cline — their mournful, meditative songs. Nowadays I admire those artists unabashedly, along with S.G. Goodman, Kacey Musgraves, Amythyst Kiah, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” Does this music inform my poetry? Not consciously. But maybe, somehow.
NWR: Likewise, what is your relationship to so-called “grunge” and the music of the Pacific Northwest? Has that legacy of Seattle’s sound influenced your art?
GB: I grew up in the 90s, so I wasn’t around when “grunge” was at the height of its powers, but introspective angst and the pain of alienation will always hold sway for many artists, including myself. I’m drawn to art that mines from loneliness and the use of distortion as a technique (in songs and in poems). When I write poems I’m often searching for how to draw out the strangeness I can sense hiding behind casual language, and distortion — whether it’s a slant rhyme, repetition, or some new context that stretches the word or phrase in a different direction — is a way to puncture that surface.