Laura Theobald Interview

In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, our girl Cleo says, “My salad days, / When I was green in judgment: cold in blood, / To say as I said then!” She’s talking about an old fling with Caesar. Cringe. Caesar’s out, Antony’s in. We all have our regrets. That’s what asps are for.

More than 400 years after the Bard writes those immortal lines, Laura Theobald releases her latest poetry collection, Salad Days. Theobald and Shakespeare share a lot of the same subjects—relationships, politics, food, animals. For both, the everyday concerns of normal human beings are more revelatory than many of us first assume. There is poetry in ice cream, dinosaurs, puddles.

Theobald exposes the extraordinary weirdness of day-to-day life. Deft humor and deep despair are doled out in equal measure, often in a single poem. I was consistently amazed at the inventive imagery and emotional intensity Theobald manages to pack into ten lines or less. She critiques the modern world’s absurdity, while celebrating life’s strange joys. Ecstatic love and bitter heartbreak are both explored with deadpan candor: “I understand this is a life of mediocrity / I have prepared in every possible way”

I corresponded with Theobald as 2021 drew to a close. The end of another surreal pandemic year bleeding into further uncertainty. Needless to say, an apropos time for artists to be alive and working. In the conversation below, Theobald and I discuss the versatility of the simile, how to embrace the low-brow, and why writing poetry goes beyond simply screaming into the void.

Salad Days is available for purchase from Maudlin House here.

I’m always curious about how writers get their start. Do you remember the first poem you ever wrote and what attracted you to the form? When did you decide to start seriously pursuing poetry and start publishing?

I’ve been writing poetry since I was pretty young. My mom always kept a journal and would give me journals on my birthday. I drew in them, and wrote down song lyrics, and used them as a diary, and wrote poetry. It wasn’t until around the time I read Anne Sexton in college, though, that I started really paying attention. The first time I saw a poet read from their own book in-person I knew I wanted to be a writer and make books. I published my first poem at twenty-one.

I remember discovering Sexton as an angsty teen and finding much solace in her work. Great gateway poet.

Salad Days is your third book. How do you go about conceptualizing a collection? Do you set out to write a full-length from the start based on a theme or idea or mood? Or is it more of writing individual poems until they pile up and you realize they could coexist together?

Yes, gateway poet. She leads to harder poets. No, but she does present ideas with fairly straightforward language, and talk openly about womanhood, which are two important types of representation for people who are just starting with poetry, I think.

At this point, I do set out with the idea of a full-length collection, but that doesn’t always mean the actualization of that is a clear path. With Salad Days, because it’s composed so much of similes and these definitive “I am” / “you are” statements, I often had just a line or two at a time and then the freedom to move those lines around and present them in different ways. The book wasn’t really finished until Mallory Smart (at Maudlin House) suggested I add ten more poems to the manuscript, which became over twenty. Luckily, because I had all those standalone lines, I was able to make that happen.

You mentioned the frequent use of similes and “I am” / “you are” statements. I was so impressed how you took these commonplace figures of speech and used them in unexpected ways. “It is like a suicide note that goes on too long” or “I am secretly wonderful like a lost letter or a black pie”—so many clever lines that follow the same basic structure but continue to surprise. It just goes to show that even the simplest poetic devices can be reconfigured in profound ways. What attracted you to employing declarative sentences and similes as a main current in Salad Days?

Thank you. I was inspired when Chelsey Minnis’ book came out with Wave in 2018. Nobody has made a connection between us yet that I have heard, but when I was writing SD I was fairly insecure about the similarities.

What’s interesting about similes is you can soar these great distances. You can find yourself being really clever. You start with an “I am” or “like” and then you finish with the first image or phrase that comes to mind. You almost never know where your mind will take you. For me, it kept taking me to these truths I wasn’t expecting. It’s very easy for me to think about the idea of a muse sometimes, or of poets being a kind of conduit, because so often it was like these comparisons were just sitting there waiting for me to pick them up and write them.

That sense of discovery is what can make poetry so fun to write. I think the artist as conduit phenomenon is one of those timeless mysteries, but definitely something a lot of people (myself included) have experienced. Just letting go and tapping into the unconscious is quite a trip.

I was also curious how you landed on the title structure used throughout the book. “Ghost Poem,” “Onion Poem,” “Lucky Poem,” etc. It makes everything both open-ended and hyper-focused. I also like the idea of taking all the fuss out of belaboring over a title. On the other hand, the seven sections of SD have specific titles that seem to reference music (“Double Fantasy,” “Infinite Sadness”).

It felt right to keep the titles pretty simple for this collection. It was fun to be able to name some of them after different types of food, in keeping with the title of the collection, maybe the funniest of Shakespeare’s neologisms. As for the section titles, I was sort of reclaiming my appreciation of music while writing this, so music is coming up throughout... Courtney Love (who I adore) is mentioned, songwriting, instruments... “Double Fantasy” from the poem “Fantasy Poem,” where there’s the line, “You are like your own evil twin [...] It is like a lazier double fantasy.” “Waves of Confusion” seems to me to have come from nowhere, but it reminds me of the Pixies song “Wave of Mutilation.” “Art for the Afterlife” is maybe the most conceptual section title; it doesn't come from anything that I can think of; that section speaks about the process of writing poetry to some degree. “Future Moods” is kind of apocalyptic. “Moon Unit” is named for Zappa’s daughter, of course, and the section dotes on the sun/moon/planets. “Sour Times” is from Portishead and from “Sour Poem,” which goes, “The future seems like an eternal shit / And sour like the mind of a pervert.” “Infinite Poem” was one of the last batch added to the collection and so “Infinite Sadness” just made sense for that section.

That “like a lazier double fantasy” line kills me. SD is infused with such an endearing sense of humor. As frequently funny as the collection is, there’s also a potent sense of melancholy throughout. It’s an effective juxtaposition because one minute you’re laughing at some offbeat observation and then there’s an emotional sucker punch that catches you by surprise. Reminded me of Richard Brautigan’s poetry. How do you go about striking a balance between humor and heartache in your work?

Brautigan is one of my favs. I realized a long time ago that I wanted poetry to really speak to people, to be fun and unpretentious, and to say exactly what it is I wanted to say—however low-brow, or irreverent, or sentimental, or sincere. I think, in a way, being a good poet is learning how to present all sides of yourself and having the multitudes make sense as a whole, just like we do as people. I think poets often limit themselves by subscribing to this certain austere aesthetic that’s so popular, not to mention turn people away. I can understand that some projects are going to have a certain weight or feel, but we should want to be able to express the whole range of emotion—our silliest self alongside our most broken or whatever. Because that is the human experience—that sudden or violent movement from laughter to heartache.

Low-brow, irreverent, sentimental, and sincere—my kind of poetry! I think a big part of why SD is such a fun read is because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Alongside the wide range of human experience you mentioned, a lot of the poems in SD feature frank depictions of sexuality. I found this refreshing given the current trend of a lot of writers shying away from sex. Seems like there’s a weird anxiety about it for some reason. I see a lot of debate with people saying, “Don't ever write sex scenes!” I also remember hearing about a reading you did where the venue was outraged over your use of the word “cunt,” which strikes me as an inherently misogynistic response. Why do you think writing/speaking about the female body still provokes such strong reactions? What makes poetry a good outlet for exploring these issues?

Yeah, it was such a shocking response from that venue. (You can read about what happened here.) The things they said about me were pretty vile, infinitely more offensive than me saying the word “cunt.” I’m still not sure what lesson to take away from that experience. That it’s still controversial, even among young, normal-seeming people, for women to demonstrate ownership of their bodies? I mean, I see misogyny every day, but it never stops being totally shocking every time and just disturbing on every level. I don’t know what the answer is.

I guess maybe in that instance a (to me) pretty innocent and playful poem was able to unearth this small instance of depraved thinking and expose it. So in that sense, maybe we can say that poetry makes things happen. But I’m not sure that poetry is necessarily a better outlet for sex than other forms of writing. I’m working on a novel that has a lot of sex in it. It’s maybe the same kind of inclusion issue I was touching on before: sex is a big part of life, I think, for most of us—plus, it’s mystified and complicated and bad and good... not writing about it seems disingenuous.

I’m sorry you had to go through that. There’s definitely a double standard—not just in the lit world—of men being lauded for their “edginess,” while women catch all this grief for talking/behaving in a similar way. Definitely shocking that this shit still happens, but we do live in America after all!

Speaking of which, I noticed quite a few of the poems in SD have a political bent. There are lots of subtle critiques of capitalism and consumerism and the insanity of American culture. I see a lot of debate about whether or not artists should have a sense of political responsibility. Circling back to this idea you mentioned that “poetry makes things happen,” do you think writing can be an effective tool in the fight for social justice? Do artists work because of or in spite of the apocalyptic atmosphere we face today?

I think writing for sure can be an effective tool in the fight for justice. With poetry I think there’s some nuance to that idea. Am I “fighting” by merely noticing corruption and greed? Or writing about it? Am I gaining ground? When I’m reading other people’s poetry do I get the feeling that I’m accomplishing something? I think that would be rare and is kind of not what poetry is for. I’m not making a practiced, rational argument or a plea. It’s more like screaming into the void. Or to whoever will listen, whoever wants to be near someone who is also screaming.

We’re beginning to see the large-scale effects of global warming on a daily basis, and our government is racing past every flag, hoarding wealth so they can afford a first-class seat to the apocalypse. And we’re writing poems. It’s inadequate and absurd, but it’s also something. It helps the time pass, it gives you access to a community of sorts, it quiets the voices. It helps, in a way. You write in spite of and because of and because you can't imagine not, I think.

Laura Theobald is the author of three books of poetry—Salad Days (Maudlin House, 2021), Kokomo (Disorder Press, 2019), and What My Hair Says About You (Metatron Press, 2017)—plus three chapbooks. She’s a PhD candidate in English at UGA in Athens and received an MFA from LSU, where she served as Editor of New Delta Review. In her spare time, she designs books for independent publishers.