Paul Semel Interviews Joyelle McSweeney on Her Latest Book, Toxicon And Arachne: Poems

Introducing their discussion, Semel notes that McSweeney's latest was inspired and influenced by "personal tragedy [which] prompted her to make changes to this collection." Picking up from there:

To start, is there a theme to the poems in Toxicon And Arachne?

Yes! One day I was randomly looking up the etymology of the word “toxin” and I learned it derives from the Greek word for “arrow.” I started thinking — how is a toxin like an arrow? How does it sink its tooth in you, how does it take aim? How is a lifetime of toxicity like a lifetime of arrows sinking into your body and brain? And soon after I began to think: how is lyric poetry both like a toxin and like an arrow — how does it sink its deadly tooth in your heart, and ear, and brain, again and again?

So, did you set out to write poems around this theme or did you realize a theme was naturally emerging as you were putting this book together?

Both. For me, once I started thinking about toxins and toxicity this way, I started to wonder if I could think of a collection of poems like a quiver of poison arrows. How would they fly, and how would they sink? This notion of the arrow’s flight — rising and sinking — helped me revise individual poems, and the notion of toxicity helped me sharpen each poem’s tooth. As I read back over poems I had written in the previous couple years, I started noticing the theme of toxicity, virality, contagion, fatality everywhere. I wanted my volume, Toxicon, to have that too — a sense of fatality, a sense of something pressing in from everywhere, like environmental toxicity.

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