Unlatch the Tongue, Speak More Truth

Poet Tina Carlson discusses the iterative, intuitive, collaborative process of building her second solo poetry collection

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Tina Carlson about her second solo poetry collection,  A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery. We discussed the iterative, intuitive, collaborative process of building the book, plus:

• How Tina’s day job in healthcare inspired this work

• How embracing paradox and working in personas helps poets write about complex experiences

• The counterproductive pressure to have “something to say” in poetry

• The essential role of community and mentors in the process of developing the book

Tina Carlson is a poet living in New Mexico. Her first book, Ground, Wind, This Body, (UNM Press, 2017) deals with the theme of what can happen to a family when the veteran has not gotten help for their trauma. She is co-author of We Are Meant To Carry Water (3: A Taos Press, 2019, winner of the NM/AZ book award for poetry anthology)—a book of persona poems written in response to he 2016 US presidential election. Her most recent book A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, is just out from University of New Mexico Press. Her chapbook, Obsidian, will be published later in 2023 by Dancing Girl Press

Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read the interview. To hear Tina read poems from A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, check out the video (I highly recommend it).

Unlatch the Tongue, Speak More Truth

Radha Marcum: So I would love to start with a question about the book’s origin. Can you share a little bit about the process of developing the poems for this book and where those poems started?

Tina Carlson: I began writing the poems when I was working in healthcare for the homeless in Albuquerque. A lot of sex workers there were being murdered by a serial killer, who to this day, I don't believe has been caught. I didn't know any of the women who were murdered, but I have a lot of clients, women, who knew those women and were very fearful. No one was talking about it. There were a few newspaper articles, but the story went underground because these women didn't have cultural worth, I guess. 

Not that I could give voice to those women, but I wanted to give voice to the horror and also to the humanity of the women that were being killed. I was engaged in this inquiry about how we give voice (or at least notice the voiceless) through persona poems. I started to ask how I might feel my way into the experience of say, an ancestor or fairytale character or even a lampshade or a metronome, inanimate objects, and that was the genesis of the book.

Radha: That challenge of inhabiting another way of thinking about the world is really important thread throughout the poems in the book. Does that relate to the title? How did you choose the title? 

Tina: I’m a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and my area of expertise is perinatal mental health—pregnancy and postpartum. I hear about tongue tie surgery a lot. It's a surgery done on infants to unlatch the tongue when it’s tied too tightly to the bottom of the mouth so that they can latch and feed, but it's also a kind of surgery done on adults for better speech or eating quality. 

It seemed an apt metaphor at the time for my mother, who I have a long and complicated relationship with. As a child, as many women were in the 50s, her voice was shut down. Women had to be nice and take care of everyone else. She was always telling us about this experience as a child where her mouth was washed out with soap whenever she'd say a bad word or something her parents didn't like. I found that horrifying. It seemed like an apt metaphor for silencing. 

“A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery” actually is the name of a poem about my mother, but I saw that it encompassed the theme of the book. How do we all promote the excavation or maneuver where we can unlatch the tongue and start speaking more of the truth, things that may be unpopular or fierce? 

Radha: It’s such an evocative title. To me, the poems in this collection are not only sonically rich, but also embrace the associative mind—the surreal or dreamlike quality of emotional landscapes. And yet every poem in this book feels lived. How do you think about the relationship between the surreal nature of these poems and your lived experiences? Do they correlate for you? 

Tina: Oh, yeah, definitely. I don't know how to live in the world without the surreal or without magic or mystery. I don't know that I would have survived, frankly, without that. It's always been part of my being. Since early childhood, I've had vivid dreams that have created maps for the way that I went ahead in my life. In other cases, they gave me a way to understand what was happening when there were no clear, logical words or ways of understanding. The bare truth of things feels a little too raw, too much, and maybe dishonoring of humanity which is broad and has so much possibility for transformation. 

My work deals with many women who've been traumatized, who are now having babies and want to raise their kids differently. In my practice, I ask them, what are you dreaming? What are your dreams for your life, but also what kind of dreams are you having right now? This creates a more expansive container to do the work of healing for them.

Radha: The poems are like maps, like you say, offering guidance. They describe the territories in terms that are outside of logical, sanctioned viewpoints. They’re a way to walk through the emotional territory, to make sense of it, and heal.

Tina: I love the word metamorphosis. We have these scripts that we're born with generationally and culturally. If we just live according to those scripts, we don't evolve very much. It can feel at times hopeless because those scripts can be constricting. I want to expand the story. We’re capable of transformation. How we manifest that can't just be through logical, linear mind. Mystery, the artistic, creative imagination, gives us so much more.

I keep finding things in the language that I didn't know. The poems teach me new things. There's paradox in life, right? We get confused in our culture thinking we have to feel one way about something. And that's nearly impossible. There are things that I probably feel one way about, but most things have all kinds of sides and innuendo and nuance. I love the old myths because they they're full of paradox. And it's fun to play with that in poems.

Radha: Keats’s negative capability is relevant for us now, maybe even more relevant than in other times. I think about how polarized we are in our opinions, how much the culture demands that we decide, be narrow. Somebody described it as the “tyranny of or.” This or that. I think poets are trying to knit things together, trying to preserve a mind that is whole and not split into or’s.

Tina: That's beautifully said. Working in mental health, people don't thrive when we're in that tyranny of or, and there are mental health treatments that actually deal with embracing paradox in order to expand our view of things and our self concept.

Radha: There are many different themes in the poems in the book: fairy tales, family, mythology, dreams maps. How long did it take you to generate the poems? Once you had a certain number, how did the organization unfold? 

Tina: It was not easy, and it’s not an easy thing for me to do in general. I appreciate that you work with people to figure out how to how to create manuscripts, because I don't feel like I really know how. I tried a number of different sequences. I also got a lot of help from other people to help sequence it. 

In the end, I read an article by Diane Seuss. She's always imploring you to go with your intuition, which sounds simple, but it isn't necessarily easy. So that's what I did. I laid it all out let myself work with the associative mind. I looked at how the poems wanted to sit next to each other in the book. That part actually wasn't very hard, but that happened after a year or two of trying other things.

Some of the biographical poems about my own family headline the book. And then there are poems about horrific things, the west side murders. There are inklings of transformation. And then, as the book goes on, I'm interested more in transformation, metamorphosis, bringing in myths and creating new maps. 

Radha: I wanted to ask you about that idea of the arc, the transformation, because one might get stuck on this idea that transformation has to be complete—the linear mind trying to turn transformation into a linear thing. In your book, I think there’s nuance to the idea of transformation. We might be going from tongue tied to more fully voiced, and yet it still remains complicated.

Tina: I love that. That's the paradox. Gaining the ability to view life in a more expansive, paradoxical way doesn't mean life is any easier. In fact, it's more complicated. But I think it's richer. Reality is complicated, and yet so full of awe and wonder. I don't know what's true, but I’m sure that I'm in awe of what I'm experiencing right now. That itself is transformative. 

It’s not that there's an outcome that we're looking for, necessarily, but a state of being more curious. What are the questions I want to ask today? What am I curious about? How do I find connection with others in a deeper way, away from the impulse to say, I'm an individual and I'm important, and you better listen to what I have to say. Which is so tiresome. We're all so tired of that. 

Radha: It feels important to give poets permission not to have some big point. Right? I feel that for the students I lead in workshops right now, there is tremendous pressure to say something. That's a dangerous space for us to be in, as poets. In no way am I suggesting that we shouldn't confront very challenging and difficult topics, just as you are. But I think that bringing those topics into a space of complexity and nuance—encouraging work in abstract, surreal, emotional modes—feels like the the task.

Tina: Yeah, that's right. It comes down to how we write things that are meaningful to us but also stretch us. What is charging us? My advice to poets: Don't constrict yourself to what you think you're supposed to be doing. Our brains are miraculous organs and have so much more ability to understand things than than we even know. To me, that's the possibility. There are unknown reaches, even within our own brains, that we can explore if we're not constricted by certain rules or tenants about what to write or how to write. 

Diane Seuss says write about what moves you. Start there. That's where you're going to find the juice and then craft can come into that. But let yourself let yourself go into the awe and wonder of what really animates you as a writer.

Radha: All of these ideas are so present in your book. Your book is such a gift to poets as a model for how to do this kind of work. Thank you for for these beautiful poems. 

I wonder if you might have any advice for poets who were putting together collections? Is there anything that you wish you'd known earlier? Maybe thinking back to even before you had your first book? What would you encourage poets to think about?

Tina: It takes a lot of work to amass enough poems for a collection, and it's helpful to have other people's eyes on them, particularly in a supportive way, to learn more about craft. It’s helpful to be in a group, to have some support. Attend workshops. 

And if you’re writing toward a collection, don’t get stuck in too narrow of a passageway. It’s not about writing a whole bunch of poems and then seeing if they all fit in a collection. There can be intuitive guidance. The associative mind will want to bring in other things. You can always take things out, but I think allowing that space makes a collection so much more interesting. Allow yourself some fun and mystery in the associative process. 

Also, other poets can sometimes see our themes better than we can. Some of the poems in this book came because I might have written a poem and people in workshop said, You know, you keep talking about such and such. For instance, I was talking about snow a lot. That's where the avalanche poem came in. It’s things like that other people can see. It’s not about sticking solidly to a theme, but allowing your dreams, the associative mind, to say here's another piece of that, that maybe you didn't think of, that you might want to explore. That makes the the collection more interesting.

Radha: That’s a common experience that I hear from poets—that they have been subconsciously working on a theme or motif that they didn't realize they had been obsessed with in the background of the mind, then they become aware of it through contact with readers or other poets. There’s a magic that can happen in a group like that, with people that you trust and can turn to for perspective.

Tina: Yes. Book manuscripts are collaborations. For me, the books I've written are tremendous collaborations with quite a number of people. I don't think books are something we're meant to just sit down and write and then put out there and get published. I think the cross pollination that occurs with other poets and even non-poets—all kinds of people—makes our work richer and stronger.

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Learn more about Tina Carlson’s work at tinacarlsonpoetry.com

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