Fayetteville-based poet Carolyn Guinzio has spent the last 24 years deciphering the complexity and mystery of the Ozarks through her writing. The award-winning author, originally from Chicago, has a new collection, Cameo Blue, coming out later this month. Guinzio tells Ozarks at Large that the title was initially inspired by a color swatch.
Carolyn Guinzio: It's a Pantone color, and I am interested in the idea of naming colors because it feels to me like it involves lifting a fragment off a continuum, like the color wheel, almost like it's an attempt to stop time. Most colors are liminal spaces. They're between two different shades and moving a little bit toward one or the other. And the book is really about liminal spaces. There are a lot of airports and stairwells and even states of consciousness that are between two states. And I particularly liked this color because it's named for the blue that's used in cameos. And cameos are shadow portraits, and a shadow is a shade, and a shade is a ghost. And the book is filled with ghosts who also are inhabiting a liminal space between this world and the next.
Daniel Caruth: That's a beautiful description, and it certainly is lush. It's very atmospheric. There's a quietness to some of those poems as well. A lot of it seems to be about observation and perception. Could you talk a little bit about the inspiration for many of these poems and how you came up with them?
Guinzio: I am definitely, as a poet, observational and philosophical. Very often I'm thinking conceptually about things and contextualizing concrete experiences. And so another thing that I like thinking about a lot is the impact on the built environment, on the natural environment and the idea of observation changing the observed. So we live in a somewhat rural area outside town, and there's a lot that we observe here that I find interesting. Even small things like the phoebes build nests on our house, and they build these nests thinking that they're going to come back. They fix them before they leave. And I watch them fixing these nests very carefully knowing that we're going to have to tear them down. And when they come back the following year, it's going to be gone. And that this is difficult on the phoebes, and it reduces their clutch size and those kinds of things that I'm not sure everybody is thinking about — because really, they make a mess. There's a lot of dirt all over the house and people don't like that. And I'm always thinking about my impact on the environment. And I think, well, who are we to say that dirt on our house is more important than them going through this struggle of preparing this nest for the following year? Maybe it sounds a little crazy, I don't know, but it's those kinds of things that make their way into the poems. There's a poem in the book where we're removing the nest, and the bird is standing there watching us do it, and that did actually happen.
Caruth: A lot of these poems seem very connected to the natural world, to the environment. Can you talk about your connection there and why that is a source of inspiration for you?
Guinzio: I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a very urban area, and coming out here — there were many stops in between — but I think that it has not lost its novelty for me, and I haven't lost my sense of wonder about it because my experiences with nature growing up were very, very limited. The way that we saw nature was maybe on a TV show or something like that. And so seeing nature in your actual life, it almost felt like seeing a celebrity or something — you can't believe that this is actually real. I feel like I've learned being out here that the universe is contained in even the smallest of things.
Caruth: The collection has those elements of nature, but it also has what I got as a bit of a haunting or slightly folksy, dark gothic energy that the Ozarks has. You've talked about how the region has pushed your aesthetic and your vocabulary. Could you talk more about how being in Fayetteville and in the Ozarks has impacted your writing?
Guinzio: It's impacted it entirely. I've been here now for going on 25 years. And when I talk about the wonder of nature, it is also the wonder of the culture. It is true that the folklore is fantastic and the energy is fascinating. It just feels sort of endless. I did write that sequence called Meanwhile in Arkansas, which was a chapbook that came out last year, and it was about my sense of looking at this from the outside and really almost not understanding the language, but really wanting to. Anytime I go somewhere — I mean, if you ever drive down 71 and you see that trailer that has the two-headed snake offering oddities — that's not something that I encountered growing up in Chicago. And so I'm always looking at it as an observer. And maybe there are things that you don't understand, but there are also things that you might see that an insider might not see because it's too close to their own eyes.
Caruth: For people who will go and pick this book up, or people who are curious about poetry, what's something they should be looking out for? What do you hope they take away from this collection?
Guinzio: I'm always hoping that the things that I'm writing about will connect to somebody, will connect to anybody — that they'll recognize something in it that they have felt or experienced. There are universal experiences in the book about grief and about connection and observing and nature. And the hope, obviously, is always that somebody reads it and feels something.
Caruth: You have the title poem, "Cameo Blue." Could you maybe set that up for us and let us know a little bit about how that poem is structured and its significance to the collection?
Guinzio: "Cameo Blue" is a 50-word poem which mirrors the book. It has 52 words total, including the title, and the poem is about the making of a shadow portrait. The language is a little stilted feeling because of the structure. Each line has five words and there are 10 lines.
Caruth: I am always curious with poets — what first drew you to poetry, and what is it that you love? How do you explain this to people who aren't naturally drawn towards poetry?
Guinzio: I was in college, and I was a fiction writer. That's what I was focusing on. And I wanted to take a poetry class, a poetry writing class. And I was preparing to do that by reading some poets that the professors at my school were interested in and suggesting I read — the school had sort of an aesthetic. And I picked up a book by Frank O'Hara, and I at that point had absolutely no idea of how vast this genre was and what it could contain. And I really felt like I couldn't breathe when I read that, and it was all over at that point. I was completely in love, and I thought, this is the way to get at things. Fiction is more — it's just straight. It just tells you. And poetry is trying to get at something that is harder to get at. And I liked the challenge of that. I like the beauty of it. I like the sound of it, and I like the brevity of it. I just felt that that was the only thing that was going to work for me from that point on, and that has borne out.
Carolyn Guinzio speaking with reporter Daniel Caruth. Her new book, Cameo Blue, comes out March 12 from Carnegie Mellon University Press. She will also have a book launch and reading at Pearl's Books in Fayetteville on March 12 at 7 p.m.
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