An Interview With Deborah Landau About The Uses of the Body

Maya C. Popa interviews Deborah Landau for Los Angeles Review of Books: "Have you seen an evolution in your generative process over the three collections? Have your aims as a writer changed at all?" asks Popa. Landau's latest book, The Uses of the Body, published this April by Copper Canyon Press, "considers the pleasures and complexities of domestic life — marriage, pregnancy, motherhood." More:

[Landau:] The process of making a book feels different each time. When writing a first book you don’t really know that you’re writing a book; Orchidelirium was to some extent just a compilation of all the poems I’d written up to that point. The Last Usable Hour is a winter book, an insomniac book, and written late at night in my living room, looking out at chilly post-9/11 NYC while everyone else was sleeping. The Uses of the Body was generated over several summers, revised in the seasons between, and all of a piece insofar as I kept obsessively circling the same subjects.

[...]

[Popa:] The collection pays particular attention to the juxtaposition of life and death, often with ceremony in mind: “flowery and young / came the mourners, like bridesmaids.” In “September” the speaker reflects on herself as “A wee bit deader, a wee bit more alive.” Though the inevitable trajectory towards death seems rather bleak, the verve of the language counters despair. The book looks at pleasures, the richness of food, Paris, summer — there’s excess, certainly, and beauty. Do you think that this beauty and inventiveness in language, even when considering mortality, is liberating, redeeming?

While I was in Paris that summer one of my closest friends was home in New York, watching her young husband die. She was in a state of terrible grief. The contrast between the vivid, bacchanalian street life in Paris — the gorgeous buildings and people and food and wine and sky, all the sensual pleasures of summer — seemed to exist in almost violent contrast to my friend’s suffering. It was impossible to integrate the two. In some sense, I was writing to her, in attempt to console — or at least gesture toward some future that would be ongoing and vital, and that might again include happiness and pleasure.

The simultaneity of pleasure and pain. I’ve always been haunted by that. I don’t know if there’s anything liberating or redeeming about it — I was just laying it down on the page, trying to record that dissonance.

Find the full conversation at LARB.