Poetry as a stimulant for both mind and body
When prize-winning novelist Tess Gunty moved from New York City to California, she says that 90 percent of the moving truck was filled with boxes of books. “I didn’t really have anything but books,” she says. Gunty won the 2022 National Book Award for her debut novel, “The Rabbit Hutch,” the story of a young mother scraping by in the heart of the Rust Belt by writing online obituaries. The South Bend, Ind., native lives in Los Angeles.
BOOKS: What are you reading?
GUNTY: My reading right now will sound like a crazy list. I just finished a collection of poems called “Good Boys” by Megan Fernandes. I’m also reading “The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem,” and I’m almost done with “Russian Fairy Tales,” which is an illustrated collection of traditional folk tales by Gillian Avery. I’m also reading Rachel Aviv’s “Strangers to Ourselves” and a couple of other nonfiction books, including Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Empire of Pain,” which is about the Sackler family. I’m halfway through the audio book now. It’s read by the author, and you can hear his disdain for this family.
BOOKS: Which book are you spending the most time with?
GUNTY: Megan’s book. That is so moving to me. I generally find reading poetry to be more inspiring for my writing than reading fiction. Often, I’ll read poems aloud to myself before I start writing. I just started another collection, Jenny Zhang’s “My Baby First Birthday.” I also find nonfiction, even if it has nothing to do with what I’m writing about, to be really important for my imagination and for my thinking to fill
‘I like very imagedriven poetry.’
it with new information.
BOOKS: Do you largely read contemporary work?
GUNTY: I do because between high school and college I only read canonical work. I feel like I’m catching up on my own time period. I do try to read a classic novel every two months. I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” for the first time recently. That might be one of my favorite classics. I listened to the audiobook performed by Juliet Stevenson during the last round of edits of my own work. I was very anxious, and I would take these long walks and listen to it. It’s an extraordinary portrait of a place and all these different characters and perspectives. I was struck by the generosity of that narrator.
BOOKS: Do you regularly read folktales? GUNTY: I have been. There’s a lot of wisdom in books meant for children, which we unlearn as we get older, like an openness you unlearn. I have a collection of folk tales called “Tatterhood and Other Tales” that my dad read to me when I was a kid. It’s a collection of folktales from around the world and each has a strong female character. I read them recently and they are really wild. I forgot about how gruesome folktales can be.
BOOKS: Since you were an English major, which classics did you not click with?
GUNTY: I remember being frustrated by all the war novels with no female characters that we had to read in school. I remember throwing “All Quiet on the Western Front” across the room. I hated that these books prioritized the male experience of violence.
BOOKS: Which classic authors or books did you love?
GUNTY: In addition to T.S. Eliot, who was my entry into poetry, it would be Shakespeare’s tragic comedies, specifically “Cymbeline.” I’m drawn to his tragic comedies because there is something that doesn’t seem predetermined about their structure. The other formulas he uses you know where it’s going to go.
BOOKS: How would you characterize the poetry you are drawn to?
GUNTY: Contemporary poetry with the exception of T.S. Eliot. Some of my favorite poets are experimental, hybrid writers such as Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, and Maggie Nelson. I also love anything Tin House or Graywolf Press publishes. I like very image-driven poetry, one that operates with a dream logic. T.S. Eliot wrote an essay about Dante about how good poetry will assert its meaning in your body before you understand it. That is what draws me to contemporary poetry. It activates something in your imagination, in your animal self, before you understand what it means. It’s like a shot of espresso.