Rachel Trousdale in conversation with Mahek Uttamchandani
Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Several of her poems have appeared in The Nation and The Yale Review. She is also the author of Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination as well as Humor, Empathy, and Communication in Twentieth-Century American Poetry. More recently, she is the winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize, awarded by Wesleyan University Press, for her collection Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body, which released on March 25, 2025.
MU: Mary Oliver once said, “This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.” Looking at the word “attention” in the etymological dictionary, it can be understood that to attend can mean “to direct one’s mind or energies,” “to stretch toward,” to “take care of” and to “accompany or follow.”1 Given that many of the poems within Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem have been written across years, if not decades, I would be interested to know how your attentions have shifted, or stayed the same, across time. Similarly, how did you decide which poems to include in this collection?
RT: I have two parallel answers to this, and one is that my attention has really changed over the last, 15 years, which is the period during which most of these poems were written. I have two children; one is ten and one is seven. So obviously, I was not “paying attention” to the children during the first five years of that fifteen-year span. But if you look at the poems, the children absorb a lot of “attention” once they’re there. So from a subject matter point of view, that’s been a change of attention that’s taking place over the course of the composition of the manuscript, from looking at all sorts of things to looking at my kids.
But that makes it sound like an either-or or a choice, and I can’t think of a worse way to raise children than by just looking at the children—that’s not good for them or for the parent. So I hope there’s been a constant curiosity about the world. I like finding new things and correspondences between unexpected items and examining them. How is a marriage like a coral reef? It mostly isn’t. So finding that metaphor was a real pleasure for me. That attempt to find correlations between, apparently, quite unlike things is, I think, a constant across the book.
MU: I think you do that wonderfully, and part of this might be attributed to the way the collection seems to be divided by theme, specifically love and family dynamics, science and the environment, and politics (both private and public). Yet, the collection also explores the intersections between these elements. For instance, “First Body Paragraph” primarily features love poems, but science subtly weaves throughout them, particularly in “Units of Measure.” Given your description of science poems as “love poems to the natural world,” how do you see the relationship between love and science shaping the thematic divisions of your work?
RT: Once again, I have two parallel answers, and one is personal. I learned to love poetry from my dad. My dad would come into my room when I was eight and tell me to put down the fantasy novel I was reading so that he could read me whatever poem he was reading. I distinctly remember him reading T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” while I was in the middle of a climactic battle of a really terrible trilogy. I did get to finish the trilogy later, and my dad was a scientist. My dad taught physics at Wesleyan for decades. So actually, the poem “Optics Lab,” which is also in the book, is set in the basement of the Wesleyan science tower. My dad ran that lab, probably in the 1980s…
…My initial exposure to poetry came from the same source as my initial exposure to real scientific thinking. Of course, we all get science in school, but it’s different when you’re getting it from a parent directly, not just as a form of instruction, but as a way of looking at the world—a kind of close attention to detail. For me, science and poetry, like many other forms of meaningful inquiry, are very much about looking very carefully at selected objects and then trying to learn larger lessons from them. So I see those two things as going together very tidily in certain ways.
But you didn’t ask about science and poetry. You asked about science and love, and there, too, I think that the attention to detail and the learning from that detail can be generalized beyond just the field of science…. I had this hypothesis, but now that I’ve run the experiment, I’ve determined that my hypothesis needs adjustment. This also applies to meaningful relationships. Really close, passionate attention to what’s happening and wanting deeply to understand it is as much a gesture of love as it is a gesture of scientific inquiry. I’m not a scientist. My PhD is in English, but whatever field we’re in, we can learn these methods from other fields.
MU: That’s amazing. Yes, I think it’s so interesting to implement scientific ways of looking at things into not just your romantic relationships, but into platonic and other types of relationships as well.
RT: Yeah, it works with relationships, but also thinking about love in terms of science. We think humanities people will often think of science as clinical and abstract. But the scientists that I know are motivated by love for their subject matter, and thinking about the love we feel for the objects of our attention can also help us understand how best to pay attention to them, whether that’s climate science, physics, biology, raising a kid, etc.
MU: Changing gears a little bit, the form of poetry in the “Third Body Paragraph” takes an interesting turn. You become more experimental with the use of the page, playing around with white space and the sectioning of the words visually, forming shapes, walls, and more. However, with this freedom, the poems also become more political. This section opens boldly with the poem “A Long List of Small Mercies”, which begins by saying, “1. But we have deferred our son’s first active shooter drill.” It’s an incredibly poignant poem. “Night Shift, Summer, 1994” takes on an entirely different form. The poem consists of 3 parts, each exploring power dynamics imposed on working-class women who experience economic necessity and vulnerability. I would be interested to learn more about the role of politics in your work. It’s obvious that politics are intertwined in your poetics, but how do you work to manifest them in your craft? Does working in a more experimental form allow you greater freedom in expressing your opinions? How do you decide what form the poem should take?
RT: Oh, that’s another interesting question. Thank you. Honestly, I hadn’t noticed that many of my more experimental poems are also some of my more political ones, and those were written. Some of the ones that you’re mentioning are written over quite a span of time. Obviously, “A Long List of Small Mercies” is a pandemic poem.
MU: Oh, I hadn’t noticed that!
RT: Well, it’s a pandemic poem, because that’s what deferred my kid going to school. My older child would have entered kindergarten in the fall of 2020, and he didn’t. So, on the bright side, he didn’t have to learn how to hide in a closet for an extra year. But you know, we didn’t enjoy the reason, whereas “Night Shift” is one of the older poems in the book, and itself, of course, harkens back to a much older experience– working at the McDonald’s on Washington Street in Middletown when I was in college.
So, I think that there’s a sense in which I would argue that any poem is political. But sometimes, the political nature of the poem is the belief expressed by the poem, that it can live in an apolitical world. And it is my belief that considering oneself to be somehow apolitical is itself a political gesture, which is, of course, a terrible argument to make because, much as Freud will say, the fact that you think I’m wrong in my analysis merely proves that I’m right in my analysis. Similarly, there’s no way out of it if I say, “Well, you can’t be apolitical. There’s no such thing as apolitical.”
But I would argue that a love poem written in the privacy of the lovers’ home…is conditioned by the circumstances of the love so if I, as a cisgender heterosexual woman, write a love poem to my male spouse, I’m doing that in the context of a world that enables me to do that… Love poetry written by women often takes a slightly different tack than love poetry written by men, even if it’s within a traditional heterosexual relationship. Raunchy love poetry by women, for example, is totally absent from my book because it’s not something I want to write. But maybe the reason I don’t want to write it is in part due to some of the subliminal discouragement I’ve received… So writing a poem is political, even when the politics doesn’t show.
MU: I’m also interested in how the “Third Body Paragraph” navigates the idea of “home” and how it is constantly changing—be it a person who is growing older, a living rock that is suddenly decaying, or a landscape that was stripped of its resources one time too many and is now unexpectedly resisting its exploit. No matter the shape “home” takes, there is some level of impermanence to it. Yet, in the collection’s final poem, “Packing List,” there is a strong sense of trying to hold on to the home through seemingly trivial memories. Do you think of “home” as something we can claim as ours and shape according to our will, or is home inherently in flux, always shifting beyond our control?
RT: You’re asking really good questions! In my other life as a literary critic, my first big project was a book on Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie, both of whom I look at as similar despite their very different backgrounds. Salman Rushdie [was] born in India. Nabokov [was] born in Russia. Nabokov live[d] in Germany, France, America, and then finally Switzerland. Rushdie move[d] to England… They have very different biographies, but they take a similar approach to thinking about what you can bring with you when you cross very literal geographical borders.
And I mentioned my dad is a physicist. My mom, until a couple of years ago, taught in Wesleyan’s Russian department. So I grew up surrounded by Russian emigres. And although I myself was born in Connecticut and now live in distant Massachusetts, I have always thought about home in ways that were conditioned by other people’s experience of exile, of immigration, of voluntary and involuntary change of place. I’ve always had in my head the idea of there being the things you can bring with you and the things that you can’t.
But what you can bring with you is your memories. And, if you’re lucky, your people. You get in the car with the members of your family and drive off. And so home is, by its definition, impermanent; even if you never go anywhere, even if you die in the house that you’re born in, things are going to change. The trees will grow. Some of the trees will fall over. The mice are going to get into the cellar. Maybe you decide to raise the roof, put in a bed or windows.
Because life is a condition of mutability. The alternative is stasis, which is basically a form of death. So home has to change. You don’t have a choice. So in “Packing List,” I was thinking, “Okay, well, what can you bring with you when you cross whatever the barrier is, whether it’s a border with a passport, or when you die, what goes with you?” And I think that those are deeply connected for me and probably for a lot of other people, too.
MU: I think reading this, especially after everything that’s happened with the California wildfires, this poem stood out to me even more. Home has never seemed so impermanent. It’s in the every day, especially as college students, each year we pack up our dorms and then unpack them again. And, even within that one year, you choose what to give away, what to take with you…
RT: Yeah, and some of those objects that you want to bring are really important— I mean, obviously you need your computer—but you probably also need that journal you’ve been scribbling in and that little candy heart your best friend gave you on Valentine’s Day when you went out together.
MU: Yeah, I actually do have a little memento like that, the cork from the champagne bottle my friends got me for my 21st birthday!
RT: And sometimes you actually do pack up the old champagne cork. Sometimes, that’s the thing that’s worth bringing with you. But since you’ve only got so much room in your bags, how do you pick? And of course, we have to do that with our memories too, because, if we’re lucky, we live a long enough time that we’re going to forget a lot of things. So how do you pick which memories you want to make sure you hold on to?
MU: And then, sometimes, you don’t even get a choice with that either.
RT: Well, and there, too, right? You don’t get a choice with some of the physical objects, the house burns down. Sometimes somebody spills a coffee mug on whatever it was you were going to be carrying with you. So the process of selection is partially randomized, no matter how careful you are.
MU: But at least it’s not stasis!
RT: Exactly—that would be worse!
MU: Well, speaking of the last poem in the book, “Packing List”, brings me right back around to the title: Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem. Thinking about that and the collection’s structure itself, which takes the form of five sections– an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion– the book comes across as quite academic, calling to mind the format of a persuasive essay. What made you decide to format the book in this manner? And given the collection’s essay format, what do you suppose is its thesis?
RT: I think the thesis is that there are a lot of ways, physical and intellectual, of finding joy and pleasure in the world, and that we have to do it even in the face of the various things that interfere. I mean, I was just getting all serious about mortality, and you still need to go eat chocolate cake at some point, and that is almost a moral imperative.
The title is partly a joke. I, as a teacher of writing at the college level, read a lot of five-paragraph essays. And I live in a permanent state of warfare with the five-paragraph essay because I consider it a very limiting and prescriptive and ultimately quite boring form. I keep mentioning my children. My older child just came home from school with his first ever five-paragraph essay, and I looked at it in just hilarity and despair, because he’s doing exactly what he was told, which is the three sentences in the opening paragraph, laying out what each paragraph will be about, and then repeat the sentences at the start of each paragraph, and then repeat them again at the conclusion. It’s a format that’s really designed to be boring and not to give you any room for discovery.
So I object to five-paragraph essays on principle, and in my writing classes, I’m always urging students to move past them, to use what they’ve learned in high school about five-paragraph essays as a form of structure, as like the diving board that they’re going to do their triple jackknife off of and discover something better now that they understand how to do structure.
My collection takes its title from a poem that has the same title. I wrote it after a long night of grading as an act of rebellion against the prescriptiveness of the five-paragraph essay, which interferes with discovery. And I found myself thinking about the way the five-paragraph essay structure limits what you can discover is like an analogue to how, when our bodies go wrong, when something happens that makes you ill, it limits your activities, both mental and physical. So in that poem, the speaker is based in part on a character in an Oliver Sacks book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, who is suffering from cerebral syphilis, somebody who has been literally driven mad by a venereal disease…The body is sort of interfering with what had hitherto been the self. And as I was trying to structure the collection, I discovered that that interference between your body and your sense of self was a through-line for a lot of the poems.
The structure that you’re inhabiting, whether it’s “Is this thing a sestina?” or, “Hey, look, I’m going to steal a bunch of end-rhymes from a Yates sonnet,” (those are both formal bodies), or, “Okay, I’m working at McDonald’s because I’ve got to pay the rent. That’s a constraint on my life,” what does that do for what I can accomplish outside of my working hours, or just the very simple fact of physical illness or one’s human physicality? How do those condition our emotional experiences? How do they condition what discoveries we can make, and where can we push back on it? Where can the mind find those limits and work around them or escape them in one way or another? I think that’s the question you asked.
MU: It went a lot of places, but if it’s a rejection of the five-paragraph essay, then it should go a lot of places. In this case, would you say the five-paragraph essay is anti-intellectual?
RT: I suppose I would argue that the five-paragraph essay can be quite anti-intellectual because the foreclosure of discovery sets too much of a limit on itself. To be called an intellectual by Robert Pinsky was definitely a career highlight for me, but I hope that he understands the term in the same way that I do—not of just having a credential or knowing some things, but of viewing curiosity and learning as central to how we understand the world. I would argue that an intellectual is someone who may have developed an expertise in one or more topics but is aware that there’s always more to be curious about in the world and aspires to put those pieces together. So, from that point of view, I yearn to be an intellectual!
MU: This is my last question for you. I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight your achievement in winning the Cardinal Poetry Prize, which is given to a poet aged 40 or older who has not been previously published. Your reception of this honour (which is where Robert Pinsky called you an intellectual!) was incredibly well deserved, and in reading your work, it’s clear that writing is a natural state for you. Now that this collection, comprised of your writing through the years, is out in the world, where do you see your poetry heading next? What new ideas are occupying your attention?
RT: That’s fun to think about. Some years ago, I had the good luck to be in a Bread Loaf [Writer’s Conference] seminar taught by the amazing poet Terrance Hayes. And a term that he used a lot in his feedback, not just to me, but to all of us in the seminar, was “wildness,” and I particularly remember him saying of one of my poems, “I’d like to see more wildness here.” And
I thought he was absolutely right.
A thing that I have been working on is trying to let the poems go to places that surprise me. As I mentioned, sometimes I’ll get an idea for a poem that is “Okay, I’ve got to get it to this last line.” A challenge I’ve been giving myself lately is, once I’ve gotten to that last line, checking to see if it really is the last line. Maybe there’s somewhere else, [somewhere] stranger and more productive that the poem can go after it’s reached its preliminary destination.
You mentioned politics earlier. I’ve been thinking a lot about what poetry can do that interacts usefully with politics. W.H. Auden says that poetry makes nothing happen. He says that in his elegy for William Butler Yeats. On the other hand, Percy Bysshe Shelley says poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. These are two sorts of opposed statements by poets who have a dog in the fight about poetry. I presume, since almost everybody’s wrong all the time, that both of them are wrong one way or another. So if poetry can make something happen, but we’re not legislators, what can it make happen?
MU: That’s a very big question. A wide berth to occupy your attention!
RTL We’ll see where it gets me, if anywhere. I may just spin in circles. Let me know if you come up with an answer.
MU: I mean, that could be a really nice thing to do with your poetry, though. And, for what it’s worth, I was in a poetry class last week, and one of my classmates referred to the poem as the needle through which you thread the two parallel planes of language and soul. And, although poetry doesn’t necessarily give you legislative power, it might allow you, as the poet, to give the power of language to someone who is in that seat. Even if you’re not the one in the position to change the law, maybe your words can touch the people who are and kind of bring them to a new place of thinking. And I don’t know, maybe that could be one of the powers of poetry.
RT: I hope so, I think that’s a beautiful idea.
