"Nobody is normal.": An Interview with Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort took part in an interview with CBS Baltimore in which she discussed her new collection Collected Body among other things.

Let's have a look-see:

CBSBaltimore.com: What inspired Collected Body?

VM: Nothing inspires inspiration, if it makes sense. Inspiration comes and goes at its only will, and there’s no way of putting a finger of what brought it this or that time. Collected Body happened to me in the summer of 2009, when I was staying on a small island in the North Sea, and then I worked on the book for two years, editing, cutting, and writing and rewriting. The book is definitely threaded with the idea of metamorphosis (in fact, on the cover of the book there’s an image of Leda and a Swan), travel (I’m looking at a history of walking in my family), and sensuality of womanhood and of landscapes; it’s also situated mostly between two very different landscapes – a seaside landscape which ranges from poems set on the North Sea to Caribbean Sea; and a flat, isolated landscape of Belarus.

Sex, of course:

CBSBaltimore.com: As a poet, you explore dark truths and taboos, like violence and sex. Do you feel like there’s a need to expose the tainted facts of life?

VM: I don’t see violence and sex as a taboo, especially in, say, Hollywood culture, which manufactures them daily. I think it’s hypocritical to talk about whether there’s a need to expose them or not in America where they are being in plain view and are, in fact, the only two things that sell. I also don’t think that as a poet I focus much on either, even though Collected Body is far more sensual than my first book, Factory of Tears. But personally I’m very interested in art – and films have probably been most successful in it – which show how completely perverted our so-called normalcy is. Nobody is normal. We are all freaks. That might be the only thing interesting about us. I’d recommend an Austrian film director Michael Haneke. It’s not about exposing “tainted facts of life,” it’s about making your viewer work with you, not sleep, as your work unfolds.

And a bit on how poetry kicks dance's ass:

CBSBaltimore.com: Poetry is like dance with a rhythm, form and feeling. If your style of poetry was a style of dance, what would it be?

VM: I won’t compare poetry to dance because poetry, in my opinion, is a far superior art form. We can talk about rhythm, form, and feeling in every art form, be it music or visual art. But unlike any other art form, and dance in the first place, poetry carries an important anthropological work of preserving our language in its purity, freeing it from conversational clichés and other expressions which carry no aesthetic function, but only an utilitarian one.

Read the rest after the jump.