“Admission”: Six Questions for Mary Jo Bang
Mary Jo Bang was born in Waynesville, Missouri, in 1946. She graduated from Northwestern University with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in sociology. She later earned another Bachelor’s degree in photography at the University of Westminster and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Columbia University. Putting her college degrees to use, Mary Jo Bang began teaching creative writing at Colombia, Yale, and Montana University. She also taught at The New School for Social Research and Iowa’s Writing Workshop. Bang was a poetry translator for Matthias Gortiz’s Colonies of Paradise: Poems and Yuki Tanaka’s A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. She also has written published translations of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
Along with these translated poems, she has written nine anthologies. Her collections include A Film in Which I Play Everyone, A Doll for Throwing, Elegy, The Last Two Seconds, Louise in Love, The Eye like a Strange Balloon, The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans and The Bride of E. She has received countless awards and honors throughout her career as a poet. She has been included in American Best Poetry for “In the Street,” “A Miniature,” “You Know,” and my personal favorite, “Admission.” She was also inaugurated for the New York Times in her poem “Exile and Lightning” in her collection The Film in Which I Play Everyone. Currently, Mary Jo Bang is a professor at Washington University in Missouri, her home state.
What initially drew my eye when researching Mary Jo Bang was her passion for photography. At first, I thought that the two art forms were widely different from one another, but after reading “Admission,” I thought otherwise. Phrases like “her bow mouth was forever being twinned to a tissue” or “mother-of-pearl buttons tracing the path down her spine” are undeniably cinematic lines. It’s as if she can write from a photographic memory, recreating a snapshot moment through her poetry. She is able to take feminine beauty to high definition when talking about her mother. We all look up to those older than us, but we often find ourselves setting that person up on a pedestal. Mary Jo Bang describes the brutal truth through the line “erotic fishhooks,” as people are filled to the brim with mistakes and inner turmoil. Those people are often dehumanized and misjudged by another’s perception. To critique these sour perceptions, Bang found a tool, a camera, to replace the human eye.
Why did you title this poem “Admission”?
“Admission” appeared in a collection titled A Doll for Throwing. All of the poems in that book are indebted, in one way or another, to my thoughts about the Bauhaus, a German school and art movement that existed from 1919 until 1933—when it was shuttered by the Nazis for being “too cosmopolitan.” The admission statement for the school said, “Any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex, whose previous education is deemed adequate by the Council of Masters, will be admitted, as far as space permits.” The Bauhaus was very progressive for that era in admitting women to the program but, on the other hand, female students were only allowed into the weaving and ceramics workshops, traditional female-dominated areas that were aligned with the domestic sphere. In the poem, I’m taking that idea of being a woman who has perhaps gained “admission” into the Bauhaus, where she hopes to study photography, and playing with the second meaning of the word “admission,” which is to confess or to acknowledge a truth, in this case a truth about being a woman and being aware of the ways in which femininity is and is not linked with power.
In the poem, the speaker’s vivid description of her mother conveys a woman of poised beauty. Has this kind of beauty been something you strived for throughout your own life?
When I was very young, my mother went to rather elaborate measures to make me over into her idea of “beautiful.” Even when I was four, she would curl my hair using chemical home permanents, and dress me in fancy dresses that were totally impractical. She would even sew matching dresses for my doll. I bought into that for a time until, when I got older, I realized that the idea of it was to give me a competitive edge over other girls. I didn’t want to compete in that arena. In fact, I didn’t want to compete at all. I just wanted to pursue my interests and develop perceptive ways of envisioning the world.
The speaker says, “You could say, seriousness made me impossible, exactly the same way beauty made her.” That statement is very interesting to me, since I can relate to being serious. Do you view beauty as much of a disadvantage as having a serious nature?
Various cultures define beauty differently. In America, people are bombarded with images that have often been so airbrushed that there are few, if any, people who match those altered images. And yet, companies market products that promise that by using this or that lotion, or by wearing the clothing they sell, one will achieve that so-called “perfection.” The disadvantage isn’t “beauty” per se, it’s the unattainability of prescriptive ideas of beauty, which gives rise to the need to constantly monitor one’s appearance and obsess over whether one meets some impossible standard. Certain kinds of seriousness, on the other hand, can also become an obsession, an exhausting striving of another sort.
It is clear to me that the speaker would never copy her mother’s ways, not her clothing or demeanor. Should all daughters refrain from mirroring their mothers’ qualities in order to develop their own?
I would never prescribe what anyone should do, especially relative to their parents. Plus, I don’t know how much control we have over who we are and who we choose to mirror. So much is genetically hardwired. Ideally, children should be given the freedom to become themselves.
The speaker states that since childhood, she could see those “erotic fishhooks” beneath the surface. Is that true for you as well? And if so, has this impacted the way you write about people?
For the speaker, the erotic fishhooks in the poem are those elements of power associated with feminine sexuality. And yes, like the speaker in the poem, I think I noticed from a young age how women dressed, how they behaved, and how they were looked at, both by other women and by men. I could see it in real time, as well as on television and in films. I think my awareness continued to develop through reading—literature, of course, but also in the area of psychology and sociology, and later in neuroscience. Everything I know influences how I see others and how I see myself, and that naturally influences how and what I write. But there are other influences. I had excellent teachers who taught me to stand back from my writing and view it as if it had been written by someone else, so that I could better understand what the writing was actually saying. To appreciate that, you have to look beneath the surface of language.
In a Library of Congress interview you did with Ron Charles, the then-editor of The Washington Post’s “Book World,” you stated that you were once a photographer and that you are someone who pays a great deal of attention to detail. In what way or ways has this attention to detail shaped the way you write poetry?
What I said to Ron Charles (fortunately, there’s a transcript online!) was that I have been drawn to things that require “a kind of exactitude.” Which was true of photography, and also of medicine. The attentiveness, or vigilance, you were asking about in the last question, that ability to see what is beneath the surface, gets translated in writing as image and as interiority. To take the “fish hooks,” as an example. That image is a translation of a kind of fixation, or even bewitchment, that can happen between people. Think passion, obsession, crush, buzz. To create an image, which is a concrete equivalent of a feeling, the first step is to imagine the parameters, and then to choose something that corresponds. That way, the image can act as an analog for one’s knowledge of what it is to be a human being. And sometimes, instead of using an image, I put a statement in the mouth of the speaker of the poem—so that she can tell the world what it is to be.