Desire Lines

C. Francis Fisher interviews Madeleine Cravens about her debut book of poems, “Pleasure Principle.”

By C. Francis FisherOctober 10, 2024

• Poetry

MADELEINE CRAVENS AND I met at the Columbia MFA program in September 2020, which was a strange time to be living, and especially to be starting something new. I had been living in New York City for a year, half of which had been interrupted by the pandemic. Through classes on Zoom, Madeleine messaged me.

Generous in all things, she brought me into the life she had built in Brooklyn since her birth. She cooked me whole fish in her father’s basement apartment; she took me to Brighton Beach and showed me where to buy large Russian beers, which we drank while building sandcastles beneath an October sunset. She introduced me to her friends who have now become my friends.

While we are both careful readers of one another’s work and literary gossips, we don’t often talk about poetry. Rather than talk about poets themselves—James Schuyler or Marilyn Hacker (writers we both love)—we share a certain poetic sensibility, a desire, as she writes in Pleasure Principle (2024), to pursue “the hard pit.”

Now, with her debut collection, Cravens has given the world her vision of Brooklyn that I was gifted those years ago—as well as California and Lebanon. What is it about place that matters? In this late stage of capitalism where swaths of Manhattan are indecipherable from Chicago or Boston, what does attending to place make possible?

For one thing, Cravens helps readers understand the way humans and their environments co-create one another. There is the park that circumscribes our movement, and the desire lines generations cut through it. There is the hurricane and its female name. In all the careful observations and intense feeling of this collection, its greatest insights hold the dichotomies of what it means to be human. That we shape and are shaped, please and cause pain. Madeleine and I talked about her collection and what we can do with the knowledge of these conflicting drives.

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C. FRANCIS FISHER: I want to start with the title. I’m curious about the role of psychoanalysis in the collection generally, but it’s interesting to me that you chose the title Pleasure Principle because, in Freud’s understanding, it’s the movement of human beings towards pleasure. Whereas the speaker in this collection seems to understand the ways that pleasure and pain are very much intertwined.

Are you trying to rewrite this idea that Freud has? Are you trying to challenge it? Or do you think that there’s room within his conception to include this speaker’s understanding of pleasure?

MADELEINE CRAVENS: When I was writing this collection, I was in graduate school, and reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where Freud introduces his idea of the death drive, or the human tendency toward self-annihilation. It made sense to me, thinking of drives as competing with each other: movement toward pleasure, yes, but also movement toward destruction. That inside each of us, there’s an instinct toward each of these goals. I think the title poem and the collection as a whole are trying to think through what it means to hold this duality.

Hearing you talk about the duality of these emotions makes me think about the middle long poem, “Desire Lines.” The poem examines urban planning and the preordained space of parks, as well as ways that people shape these spaces. I’m curious how these things interrelate, and whether desire lines are almost a metaphor, in a way, for how we move towards pleasure.

I think that’s an apt reading. As I was writing the poem, I was thinking about Prospect Park as a structured space that still allows for a feeling of spontaneity and agency. You’re able to forget that your movement is part of a large and complex system. The desire line is a real thing my dad would tell me about when I was a kid. In the park, he would point out these dirt paths that deviate from the circular motion of the park, mostly shortcuts between two separate areas. I was interested in how they represent a sort of slippage, a departure, a moment of straying.

There’s also a moment where the speaker references Melanie Klein, and I was wondering, more broadly, how does psychoanalysis play into this work?

I do want to say I’m not a scholar of psychoanalysis: I have no expertise in it. I’m interested in psychoanalytic literature as a reader, in the same way I’m interested in reading poetry, for the excavation of what lies below the surface. I really enjoy Klein’s work on the depressive position, on melancholy, on guilt. And especially on the centrality of childhood.

I love the way “Desire Lines” dives deeply into place. I’m curious how it felt to put this collection together that largely focuses on Brooklyn while living in California.

It was hard, honestly. I had a first draft of the book before I left New York. I didn’t write at all about Brooklyn after leaving it. I only revised pieces I had already written. I didn’t want the relationship to place to feel vague or imagined, if that makes sense. Also, I like to write about what’s in front of me, what I’m doing with my days. Some California poems did end up working their way into the book.

And how did you know that they belonged there? These poems were written over many years. I’m curious about the structure and when you knew it was finished, and the organizing principles of taking this collection of poems and making it into a book.

I think the organizing feature in this collection is the voice, which is tense, sparse, a little frantic. When I started writing in a different voice, and when I felt less preoccupied with the central concerns of the collection—family, memory, certain relationships—I felt the book was done.

I was interested throughout the collection in your use of terms that we normally associate with prose and fiction, like “character” or “plot.” Can you tell me more about that? What was your interest in bringing these more prosy ideas into the world of poetry?

I love stories. I love reading fiction. Fiction has always felt so calming to me. At times, I’ve felt at odds with my own relationship to poetry: I don’t find the experience of reading poetry to be relaxing. It’s more like working through a puzzle. It can create deep confusion and rupture. The references to story, character, and plot in my poems weren’t conscious decisions, but I see them as a desire for stability, to exist in a mode that is more legible.

Story as meaning-making.

Yeah, or coherency-making. When I was writing the poems in this collection, I had a lot of questions about what my life would look like. I mean, I still do, but I was really in a moment of, like, what the fuck am I doing?

Clearly, this book draws somewhat on your life, but there is also fiction. What was that process like, of making certain things into fiction, keeping other things facts?

The creation of a particular emotion is the goal of a poem for me, rather than adherence to fact or truth. Poetry certainly can contain fact, often beautifully so, but as a reader, I never go into poetry looking for that. Or I don’t care about the validity outside the world of the poem.

Do you have questions you want to be asked or things you need to talk about in relationship to the book?

I’m interested in hearing about your translation work, and how it changes your relationship to reading poetry, even when you’re reading poetry that is not in translation.

Hmm, good question. I was at a reading recently and somebody said, “Everything is poetry.” And I thought, That’s kind of a silly thing to say. Not everything is poetry. But everything is translation: the act of moving from the idea to the word is a form of translation. So even when we’re writing in English, we are translating whatever a thought is into language. Of course, in certain ways, language circumscribes what we are able to think, so I don’t know how true that is, but there’s something about moving from the thought into the word on the page that is always an act of translation. That awareness of translation as something that is around us all the time, whether we’re moving from one language to another, or from thought to word, has made me more interested in craft, and how people make a poem.

It’s crazy to think that you could be poorly translating your own thoughts. That seems actually completely true. I feel like sometimes I have a thought or a feeling that is not attached to language, and then I try to attribute language to it, and I ultimately create a poor translation. I do a bad job capturing it. I guess there is something in the seeking though, trying to authentically express the inexpressible, even if the result will always be failure.

That actually fits in really well with what you’re saying about your collection. That these poems express the desire to translate these feelings to someone else. I think all communication is translation.

I like this idea—of writing as translating the untranslatable within yourself for yourself, but also translating the untranslatable within yourself for another.

While writing this book, I thought the addressee was the most important thing: the specifics of whom I was writing to. Now I am realizing this is not the case. Not that the “you” was irrelevant, but I think it was far less integral than I had once assumed, less foundational to the poems.

How have these realizations you’ve had since putting the book together changed how you want to write moving forward?

This book is very much about wanting. Now I am curious about poems that that do not come from a place of frantic desire—if a new space will open up.

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Madeleine Cravens is the author of the poetry collection Pleasure Principle (Scribner, 2024). Her poems can be found in The New Yorker, The Nation, Kenyon Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere.