Praise be to Ariana Reines, of whom I’ve wanted to sing in praise since 2011, when I first heard her read the poem “Truth or Consequences.” That poem became an anthem and an aspiration among our friends and fellow poets for years after it was published in her third full-length book of poems, Mercury, and we still speak of it with reverence and even envy. Her poems are as uncanny as they are cathartic; they articulate emotions and even whole experiences for which I have no other language, through an eloquence and intelligence that I covet. I often quote her work when I’m at a loss for (my own) words. The line I’ve been quoting most from The Rose—her new, fifth book of poems—is near the end of “Hellmouth”: “What I repress contributes to the force of what I show.” The longer I try to bury my truth, or try to keep my cool, the harder and hotter my truth surges to the surface. Similarly, the force behind The Rose is what Ariana calls “volcanic desire”: an eruption of language from the depths of inchoate, chaotic longing. We met to talk about The Rose, Ariana’s muses, and the comedy, humility, and spiritual longing inherent in erotic suffering for creative purposes.
ZACHARY PACE: I’ve been wondering about your relationship to the muse of this book—not the Muses, but the living person who inspired the poems. Many of your books have a muse at the center. At what point does a certain person or relationship become a motivating drive for creating work?
ARIANA REINES: The muse of The Rose was the most fun I could find in a one-hundred-and-fifty-mile radius during the pandemic. He wanted to be written about. I could have written a lot more. He was someone who very much wanted to be seen and understood. I think the greatest muses are mysterious, obscure to themselves, and, even when they’re wrecking themselves, secretly devout. They serve beauty. He knew how to disappear and to become invisible, he knew how to suffer, and there was something shameless, rare, generous, and true in him, something solemn and serious. His father figures were David Lynch, Charles Manson, and Leonard Cohen. In that order.
And it’s true, about muses at the center of many of my books. I used to feel some shame about it. I read last year with a poet I admire, and he said that he had always wanted to be a love poet but hadn’t yet become one. Or maybe that’s something that I said—I forget. The point is, wanting to be a love poet and knowing anything at all about love are two totally different things. I’ve felt shame wondering if I was tricking myself all my life when I told myself I was falling in love, when really it was just that I found someone so insanely mysterious and inspiring that I had to get close to them. And like a sadistic lepidopterist, I just yearned to pin them to my board and scrutinize them.
PACE: This reminds of the line from an untitled poem early in the book: “It may be that I suffer because I use men as muses.” And I can deeply relate. You once told me that you encountered many people like this in divinity school. Can you say more about how erotic desire and god-hunger work together?
REINES: So, early in The Rose there’s a poem about yearning to suffer, about wanting to be hurt. This was written right as the love affair that inspired the book began. But it turned out that, once I reached my mid-thirties, nobody I dated, however casually, had any interest in my suffering, and instead, wanted me to discipline and humiliate them. It was like something inside me had flipped, but I didn’t really understand how or why. I tended to still see myself as a victim and regard men with great disgust and suspicion. I wanted to map an ancient god-longing onto romance, but it stopped working, because I guess something on some level was harmonizing. At divinity school I met a handful of exquisitely talented—queer—artists who would foment these drawn-out, long-distance, unreciprocated spiritual love affairs, and that’s when I realized why creative people love to have unattainable objects of desire. It’s incredibly inspiring to yearn, and in some ways it’s more convenient not to have real love interfering with your creative process.
In poetry, the god-hunger shows up sadomasochistically: the yearning to be dominated, and frankly—this is how the poem goes, as I know you know—raped. I’m talking about John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” in which the speaker of the poem is complaining that God won’t force him into a conversion: “never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” It’s maybe the Platonic ideal of the erotic religious poem, and I still can’t decide if it’s not terrible, if it’s even good.
I encountered a lot of people in divinity school who were romantically anorexic, which is to say they’re the types who fixate on people who aren’t reciprocating their desire. They would cultivate these great longings, and God was a good fit for them because God doesn’t answer, or God’s far away, or God is right here and immanent but they’re too distracted to hear the voice of God. All of the people in this sort of an erotic dance are able to cultivate fascinating relationships through longing: longing for something that’s far away that they want to come near, longing for something that they experience as a breeze but instead they want to be reamed or pinned and denied freedom. I don’t personally subscribe to using God in this way. But the people I know who cultivate these long-term unreciprocated desires, these are very spiritual people and they’re also incredibly creative people. Their muse is God. Not being able to have the one whom they claim to want the most is very creative for these people. They create beautiful works of art through this longing. They create businesses. They weave wonderful stories through this unreciprocated longing, this god-hunger.
The muse figure in The Rose very much wanted to be used in this way. It was part of the S&M dynamic between us. It was part of the power play. He wanted to be known. He wanted to be shown.
PACE: Your work has helped me through my own difficult relationships—not only because of my intense self-identification with it, but because of its immense generosity, its desire to be helpful and useful. In one of The Rose’s poems, “Medea,” you even write: “Give it to the world, I thought / How could I forget / I always wanted to give my heart to the world.” How long has that been a motivating force?
REINES: The more I think about The Rose, the more I think of it as a comedy. It represents the comedy of waking up finally inside my suffering and finding it funny that I’m suffering because, actually, I just want to be creative.
I got this idea—it could be totally wrong—but I remember it felt like a revelation: the reason why people fantasize about being rich is really that deep down we all wish we could give ourselves and give everything to the world and really have our gifts received. Dreaming of wealth and ease is really about dreaming of a world in which you can be as generous as you want to be. You can give of yourself totally, without holding back—all of your ideas, your artistry, your body, your love—and you will never run out of supply, and everything you give will bear fruit.
I was pushed into language—I was shoved into literature by force—because I had no personal space. My mom and brother became homeless and lived in my dorm room beginning my second year in college. So the literature I was studying became the place that received me when I had no other place to go. My tiny fledgling life had been taken over. I was shoved into poetry in a way that I didn’t expect, and I will never know if I would have chosen it if I had felt free, but poetry was hospitable.
I ended up making my work through the gift of my catastrophe. I was given pandemonium. I was given misery. I was given confusion. I was given insanity. I used those gifts to play with language. I realized this is a generous and mysterious medium. And I wanted to be generous. That would make me feel rich. I had no money. What did I have to give? Nothing. But maybe I could impart some of that excitement that I received when I was shoved into language through my own story. All my books were written through great confusion. That’s why they’re so rigorously constructed. I had to build them like houses. The Rose represents the waking-up inside of the story of suffering but also the witnessing of the immense suffering all around us on this planet and the ways that we perpetuate it in our thought-forms and societal structures. Suffering has been a hypnotic trance—and even an erotic addiction. Suffering given, suffering received.
PACE: Your work also has an immense humility in the face of “nature,” or the nonhuman entities and forces that we live among. I’m thinking of the poem “Bitch,” which describes a pretty abject landscape, with “spooge” and “spunk” and a ruthless animalism—“chicken in the jaw of the wolf”—then ends with: “Bitch this is nature / Shake your book at someone else,” which I found to be a moment of great comedy and humility. It’s saying, with an attitude that makes me laugh, that the book can only do so much, or language is only so powerful. Nature will always have its way.
REINES: Okay, first of all, thank you for noticing that The Rose is somewhat funny? Nature is so silly, if you’ve ever spent time looking at birds or, like, eaten mushrooms outside. You start to feel that a core element to the rapturous beauty of the natural world is also just laughter and silliness. And desire itself, which we take so seriously when we are acting sultry or determined, is also just a natural thing that is easy to laugh at.
I think the reason I’ve written so much about volcanic desire and sex and shame is because they’re so difficult to handle, articulate, think through. Those intensities break my brain. They’re hard to express. Language breaks down. Normative intelligence doesn’t help; it starts to look incredibly stupid compared to the strongest experiences of life.
If I think about the last twenty years in literature, in thought, in digital culture, and in activism, I see that—at least in the realm of desire—many erudite books have been written about consent, about why people are sexually miserable, about why our feelings can or can’t be trusted. About why the young aren’t fucking, why you shouldn’t sleep with a man you don’t want to have children with, why you should and shouldn’t X, Y, and Z. Desire has been pathologized, and love reduced to symptoms, sociology, porn statistics. It’s draining to contemplate and intellectualize these impulses. I’m someone who believes in love. I believe that love is a real force among the other forces that we live through in this world. Something about the weakness of language in the face of the forces of nature fascinates me. And what fascinates me about love is that it remains irreducible.
PACE: Medea is a recurring character in The Rose, and the mother figure is a kind of second muse in the poems. Medea becomes a bridge for the speaker to change positions between lover and mother. She has been a compelling mother figure to me since I was a teenager: I used to think her way of loving was profound, even if extreme. What drew you to her?
REINES: I taught poetry for three consecutive summers in Tblisi, Georgia. That’s the landmass the ancient Greeks called Colchis: Medea’s homeland, destination of Jason and the Argonauts, and also the place where Prometheus was chained to the rock.
In Georgia, nobody believes Medea killed her children. My last summer there, I had a fling with a slightly insane and very brilliant young guy; he and his cousin ritually slaughtered a ram the day I left. He sent me pictures of them skinning it. I was thunderstruck. The golden fleece, I thought. Who knows how long they’ve been slaughtering rams there? Who knows when mythological time ends? Does it ever end?
Anyhow, while working on The Rose, I made a twenty-five-hour performance inspired by Medea. It was meant to be an exploratory sketch for what my Medea would be like, if I ever wrote it as a play. I decided to approach her as a magician who did the wrong thing with her magic, which can happen to great sorcerers when they get seduced. I was thinking of Merlin (and two medieval imaginings of the conception of Merlin frame The Rose), who was seduced by Morgan le Fay, and also of John Dee, seduced in some way by Edward Kelly.
What happens to a magician when they pour their power into the wrong vessel? That was the question I wanted to ask. I was less interested in the operatic question of “How fucked up can a woman be when she’s hurt?” Maybe because I already knew the answer: very.
I love Pasolini’s Medea,starring Maria Callas. It’s maybe my favorite Pasolini movie, or at least the one I’ve watched the most. Pasolini has great mothers in his work. He was also a consumer of a kind of sex that killed him, in a way. Well, the fascists used that kind of sex to have him killed, but he had ideas about nature and the primitive in his erotic life that I don’t think we would ever let a woman say, not these days or ever. That said, there has always been something natural, wild, and perfect in my muses that has always made me feel like I’m secretly a gay man.
It’s a little bit bad the way I objectify and romanticize my objects of study, but it’s also ancient and, like, acceptable somehow—at least if you’re, I don’t know, not a woman. In Pasolini’s poetics, his sexuality was also connected to a pre-capitalist realm in which the divine and nature were bridged. I love how he portrayed the mother who’s willing to sacrifice herself and her children on the pyre of ruined love. But I also love that behind the Medea who we think of as the most taboo mother figure in Western Judeo-Christian post-democracy, there are many other stories about her in the place where she comes from.
She decides to put all of her energy into Jason, this shining man surrounded by shining men, who shows up on a boat. This is the muse notion: I need an object to focus my creative and erotic energy, and through this object, I’m going to create new worlds. In Medea’s case, she has so much power—it’s only through her that Jason can get the golden fleece; it’s only through her that he can achieve his quest—and she decides, yes, I’m going to put my power into him. I will destroy my father and my brother for him. I will betray my homeland for him. It turns out to have been a mistake.
PACE: That’s why I still love her. I can still relate. And this notion is present in that untitled poem of suffering through using men as muses: “But such men are privileged because I give them my stupidity. I preserve my stupidity for them.” When I put all my energy into one container, I have no brainpower left for anything else.
REINES: Consensual mutual stupidity. In a way, that accounts for our political circumstances as well. But we don’t want to admit that we’ve consented to being so stupid.
PACE: With that in mind, I’d like to ask about the rose itself. When the rose appears in the book as itself, it’s associated with “falling into earth”—as in the title poem, and in the final poem, “Theory of the Flower.” This gravity felt similar to a moment in the poem “Hellmouth”—the vision of souls being pulled to the earth’s core.
REINES: “Hellmouth” is connected to volcanic consciousness: the deep inner chambers of being that suck you down then erupt upward; the deep inner chambers of the earth from which volcanoes come. At the time of this book’s composition, and during the three years since, I felt a deep downward suctioning—an infernal quality—to our collective experience, where our imagination has been exhausted, where the political horizon grew sclerotic, where a nostalgic atrophy hovers inside what remains of book publishing and academia and the life of the mind and so on. And out beyond that, mind-wise, it’s wilderness. I actually prefer the wilderness. But don’t let me get distracted. The Rose is chronicling a fall. I was studying Paradise Lost while writing it.
Time is cyclical, and the figure of the rose has long been associated with eternal life and eternal regeneration. Even though, of course, the rose fades and withers and dies, it is always born again. The frequency of the rose is cognate with mystery. It’s cognate with unfathomable mystery that’s beyond words. The meaning of the rose is silence. It’s beyond words.
I think we are going through a descent, and there’s a sense of the human soul being dragged into hell. Working on The Rose, I tried to teach myself all the stories that we have of human beings who go to hell and then come out again—for example, our friend Prometheus. Prometheus and Medea are from the same place, and they’re both connected to the notions of democracy and liberty. Prometheus shared the godly fire with the people and was punished for it by being banished to a cave, but eventually Chiron changed places with Prometheus, and Prometheus was—though we forget this—eventually released from infinite punishment. Medea represents unbounded and terrifying feminine power and rebuke to the normies of Corinth. The Rose contains both the upward, volcanic surge in “Hellmouth,” in the middle of the book, and the paradoxical fall at the end of “Theory of the Flower.” In story after story about descent, from Inanna to Persephone to Alette, we are taught that though we may go to hell, we won’t stay there forever.
Zachary Pace is the author of I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am (Two Dollar Radio, 2024).