Today I gave the worst interview of my life. The interview was for our local NPR station (KUOW) given to me by a wonderful interviewer, Elizabeth Austin, who is also a poet. The interview was about the broadside series I edited called The Making of Peace and the fourth anniversary of the start of the war is coming up next month. I was to talk why I created the project and why it’s important. Not brain surgery, not the possibility of anyone dying (except metaphorically, figuratively dying) Elizabeth was so professional, so prepared, so warm, and I was a lunatic, the strange girl on the bus who stares into space, who starts talking, loses her train of thought and then stares at the floor.
Had this interview been live, I would have probably run out of the studio or just been hit by the oncoming car as I was playing the part of a deer in headlights. It was the oddest feeling, she would ask me the questions and I couldn’t comprehend them. I felt like Tracy on The Partridge Family, the first show where everyone has stage fright except Shirley Jones who runs to each of the kids telling them not to stare in public, then a 1, 2, 3 then finally they sing, “Let the sunshine in, the rays of light are shining down around you, girl.” Me? There was no singing; there were awkward replies, silence, and the strange sensation waiting for the words to come. If I had a tambourine in hand, I would have dropped it.
Thankfully, as I said, it wasn’t live. We “redid” the first part of the interview (though I put that in quotes as it still wasn’t that good), we tried to redo where I stumbled and muddled around, where I ummed my way through sentences, said things that didn’t make sense (and still, she smiled at me as if I knew was I was talking about.) It was painful, folks. The giant yellow microphone was overwhelming. I kept seeing clocks, knowing we had 12 minutes to fill. I repeated myself. I went off on tangents making sure everyone knew that 28,000 – 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the war, but no one was keeping track. I tried to tie things together, I tried to sound as if I understood why poetry was important and that I was so tired of being against things, that I wanted to be for something. I wanted to be for peace and to refocus the conversation back to it. I mentioned the Law of Attraction. I spoke as if I was burning incense in my van. I spoke as if I had prayer flags around my tongue. And through it all, she smiled and afterwards told me we had enough and I did fine. Fine, like a piece of moldy torn white bread is fine for the goats, or a crumpled up paper is fine when you just want to read the comics.
When my yoga teacher asked if anyone had any “requests” tonight, I said, “Something for anxiety.” I left the interview feeling as if I created a train wreck on someone’s front yard and she needed to clean it up. I tell myself that I’m out of practice, I haven’t given an interview in over a year and yet, when I saw a photo of Ira Glass on the wall, and how I love Ira Glass, I realized I’m an NPR groupie and while someone else’s heart goes pitter-patter over the Justin Timberlakes of the world, the Beyonces, I became star-struck in an NPR studio, like the geeky girl I was who couldn’t talk to Douglas Coupland, or to Bob Hicok when I asked him to sign my book. How I just said, “Could you sign your book, my book?” Then ran back into the crowds of AWP. Yes, this is me, Neanderthal girl and her stone-made mouth, really, inside my head there’s a lot going on, getting from A to B, from brain to mouth, I can’t guarantee anything if I’m nervous.
And I realize through all this, poetry is ticket away from this public world where you have to be on your best behavior, have your best lines ready as you can’t revise in life. But my stone-mouth, when I want it to say the right words, how it cracks and breaks, how I can’t move my limestone lips. And all of this, the pressure of the perfect response, the anxiety of trying to say it right the first time, to understand what’s going on my head when I speak—I can’t, I just can’t—all of this, it’s why I write, you know. This is why writing saves me.
