Shannan

Reading that section from “The Last Great Adventure Is You” produced in me a whole range of wild emotions. You first open with Borges and reference “The Library of Babel” with the “hexagons”. By doing so, you’ve already set up an expectation for me to be transported to a realm of myth and magic grounded, still, within deep infinite reality. I love that. I feel relaxed, I read on. And this is when you really turn the heat up. There is a violence, or perhaps it’s a hunger, in the poem that bubbles very quickly to the surface. Almost as though that which we love and wish to make our own is also what is devouring and obliterating us. “To love simply…” the speaker muses and then “the horses go mute & breathless.” I welcome you to connect any of these thoughts together and expand on them more as you think about my question: what purpose does the love poem serve today, in a world where instant connection (so-called) exists and there is often a facade of choice and freedom depending upon individual privilege? 

Rosebud

That is a very good question, one I've been thinking about a lot these days. Some might argue that love can lead one to act irrationally, abruptly, urgently. That love is the opposite of reason. That it fills one with contradictions— but it's those very contradictions that reveal the complexity of the reality of life—and not just human life—not fitting so neatly into some prescribed box.

Love is a way forward, truly.

It is real and disrupts the imaginary containers that try to shrink us. 

The world is so much larger than what would contain any of us—

I've also noticed recently there's been a rise of criticism towards multiculturalism. I am a child of multiculturalism. My parents come from two very different cultures. I am a Jew. I was raised an observant Jew. My father is Jewish, and my mother grew up in a specific kind of Mexican Catholicism, and she converted to Judaism before my brother and I were born. 

Yet my Mexican Catholic family is why I am a Jew who strives toward a better world.

My Aba always taught me tradition is important, but love always comes before the adherence to tradition. Love isn't some ideology. It's making tamales with my late Aunt Nena (who died this October and was married to my mother's eldest brother, my Uncle Balani, who passed away 7 years ago) and my cousins for Christmas and sharing the lighting of the Hanukkah candles with them the next night. It's my Aunt Nena dropping everything when my mother had uterine cancer to take care of my brother and me as my Aba fell apart. She took care of us for almost a year while taking care of her own household. She made sure I attended secular school and Hebrew school. Love and love poems don't have to be large statements. Love, as I said, is not bound by the empty talk of ideology. Perhaps an upbringing like mine has raised me with a will to give and talk. God knows we struggled for many a reason, but I wouldn't trade my life for anyone else's. It's made me work hard to strive to keep my two cultures alive through my work and taking care of my family. When my Aunt Nena passed away this October, it did not really register until two weeks later and the enormity of the grief hit me hard. I'm trying to remember it's been a blessing to have been loved by someone like her and my late Uncle Balani. They were a beloved pair of the matriarchs and patriarchs of our family. Now I have to carry the Light. They taught me to carry the Light. To not turn my back on those I love, the thorny, unreasonable, evolutionary complexity of love.

Shannan

You noted that “Love and love poems don’t have to be a large statement. Love is not ideology.” I really appreciate that a lot — that love poems are far beyond the romantic or sensual. And I think you write from all these wavelengths of love. Is there a different way you approach writing the poem depending on the “kind” of love you are exploring? Also, What do you feel about the idea of “self-love” as it manifests in poetry? Often, poets get the bad rep of being brooding, sullen artists and while, sure, there are some of us like that out there, I’ve mostly met poets who experience the gamut of the emotional spectrum, and those that are generally joyful. I’d love to hear from you more any of these thoughts. 

Rosebud

I think poetry is the one place that will always exceed and dispel and disperse the need for definition. Someone might say, "you can't use [X] in a poem anymore," and then some poet will go and do just that, and wonderfully, and newly. I don't believe all language has already been used, or there are no new ideas. Of course there are! The scientist in me is the poet in me and I promise to all the writers (but especially poets) reading this that whatever you write is part of an overall evolution of the species. In fact, I believe poetry will be the future of all human communication, or play at least a role in it. Science itself relies heavily on metaphor. Science needs metaphor. I mean, we've proven the existence of electron, but to speak of my beloved electron clouds, of which I've written so many poems about, we need metaphor. So whether you are brooding or joyful, that's really not important— you can be many things because the world needs you, whether it likes it or not. I'm a poet who writes about complicated unsolved problems in theoretical physics and this damn Vampire Bunny pops up continuously, at least in my last collection, If This Is the Age We End Discovery. I write about Matarose, my alter ego, and AntiMatterose, my Antimatter self, and then G-Dragon and power ballads and The Weeknd and loop quantum gravity. Again none of us are made to fit in neat little boxes of one identity, or be just one thing. I certainly am not and don't fit in one entrapment, and if you tried to do that to me, you'd have to divide me up and then you'd have a lot of little Rosebuds running around because I have so many timelines and pieces and places to be. Actually, that kinda scares me! I myself would be wary of a lot of little rogue Rosebud Ben-Onis running around because I know the first things they would do, and it would be many things, but all united in the name of mischief.  Troublemakers for sure, stealing all the sugar packets and taking over particle accelerators (and not just the LHC) and playground swings and slides. Movie matinees at 3 AM and co-MC'ed by a cantor and the late Carl Sagan. Actually, that would be great. Hmmm....

Shannan

I love how playful and full of wonder your thoughts are, Rosebud! (Also, you have a really beautiful name!) These are, of course, beautiful poems to read, but they are not easy poems to read. In “Wrestling Your Heart-Shaped Box for Weeks” you are writing within the musicality of Nirvana’s famous song (which I personally love even though or perhaps because it makes me cry every single time without fail). It is as though you are filling in the breaths between the themes and lines of that song with personal history and meaning. The music that carries through your language — the lyric of it all, I suppose — is in part something that feels like sweet medicine. It makes it easier to go through these difficult subjects, the agonizing breaks of consciousness, the hard truths. I wonder if you could comment more on how you infuse and use music to help or heighten the effect of language in your poetry? 

Rosebud

Honestly, I just hear what I call "the music;" I'm not sure what it is. It sure sounds like music to me. But not always music music. Confusing, yes? I follow something and then "translate" what I hear-feel-see on the page. I follow the movement of its timelines and some lands there on the page. If I don't write it down, it continues to repeat, over and over. It gets louder. It follows me. It won't let me go until I write it down. It sounds like a blessing, I'm sure, but it's also a bit frightening at times, to be honest. I'm always listening. I'll hear it nonetheless. But listening — that's an active choice. So I listen. It isn't always easy, I can tell you that much, but I understand this is happening for a reason.

Shannan 

I like this point of “hearing the music” and resonate with it a lot also. Not to be too on the nose here, but is there specific music — songs, hymns, prayers, soundtracks — that inspire you or ones you simply love?

Rosebud

Right now, it's "You Want it Darker" by Leonard Cohen. But so much more and it would take way way too long to answer. So I'll go with that.

Shannan

I love that Leonard Cohen song, the preoccupation of which is death. So, let’s talk about death. It’s not the most pleasant subject but it’s there in your poems, flowering wild everywhere. Would it be safe to say your poems are training a magnifying glass on this elusive idea and trying to unravel it in some way? I’d love to know more about what informs your writing on this subject. I know you have personally been through difficult things recently and, collectively, as a society, we are going through great turmoil. How is your poetry informed by your circumstances and the world’s? Though your writing is deeply personal, it does not feel exclusively autobiographical. Often it feels that your poetry has a whole mythology of its own. Who do you write for? Do you want your readers to search externally, beyond your poems, about all the things you are feeding them in the text, or do you aim to contain their experience within the page? For me, both things appear to happen. I am drawn to exploring the ideas and images you create but I also feel spellbound by what I’m reading, unable to peel away. Please speak about any thing I have mentioned here. 

Rosebud

The poems are from my next collection, which begin as a sequel to my Alice James collection If This Is the Age We End Discovery. The new collection opens in the aftermath of violence and loss, guided by the motif of the Icelandic horse who takes the reader through ravaged landscapes of the physical world and the quantum world. The horse is more than motif or metaphor. This isn't some folktale. This is my life on the page, moving in ways that I can't always move in real life. These poems are based on a tragedy that happened in my childhood, something very terrible that happened to me as a child, that I then had to confront as an adult again when my life fell apart in 2020. I'm still figuring out how to carry it. I definitely have gone through periods of many near-deaths, and not just in 2020. I think my life has been made up of many near-deaths. I also think the assumption that all life is apex-driven toward violence, that there can be only one victor, that even in the world of atomic elements, iron means death for stars— this is a false assumption. We are meant to find a way to exist long after everything as we know ends. I mean, the conditions which have made our existence possible are so statistically rare, you know? Like for life to occur on this planet in how it has occurred— it's such a slight chance. But it did happen. Here I am. Here you are. I want to honor that slightest of chance. We must get beyond what would try to contain us. As a mixed Jew, as someone chronically ill, as a person whose communities are diverse and I call them all home— I know something better awaits. Better health, better inventions, better conditions for all life on this planet.  My poems in the collection show one way that that forward might look like, toward what I call  ​​​:: the Wild unPlace ::

Shannan 

The motif of the Islandic horse sounds stunning and appropriate. I’d love to know more about how you connected this with the quantum world. I do notice that a lot of your poems also have special formatting and there is a way that breaks in emotion and thought translate into the physical words. Could you delve a little bit deeper into the creative science of that, please?

Rosebud

Yeah, the poems just land on the page how they land. I don't really think too much. I didn't always write like this. I really am just following The Music. Often others point out to me things I do, turns and such, but honestly that's just what comes out of me. I'm listening. HaShem, all my late family and friends, everyone I've lost and everyone I still have, All Beloveds, I am here and I'm listening.