Alina Stefanescu is a Romanian-born poet who resides in Alabama. Her recent poetry collection, My Heresies, was published by Sarabande Press. Her poetry shifts geographical and chronological spaces, mining from the deep folkloric tradition of Eastern Europe as well as the spaces in the American South where she now resides. I sat down to talk to Alina Stefanescu about the role of names and naming, the various, disparate, eclectic references that pepper her poems, and the terms “heresy” and “defection,” specters of which haunt this collection through the variety of languages and modes in which they are conjured.
My Heresies is dedicated to your namesake, your maternal grandmother, and opens with a poem “Byline, Be Sky,” which suggests that the wind warms the names we are given. Do you view the role of naming as method of exercising dominion over creation, per the Genesis account? Or, given the matrilineal heritage of this specific act of naming, do your heresies involve a subversion of that paradigm?
Names are funny: we hear them spoken based on how they are written—but the moment in which the name is given signifies more to me than the pronunciation. The only time my name was pronounced completely was when my mother first spoke it over me, intoning the longing for her own mother who died of breast cancer while she was still pregnant with me.
There is power in the moment of being ‘given’ a name. Just as there is a tenderness in saying a name that has vanished, a lyricism that haunts Forrest Gander’s poem, “The Moment When Your Name is Pronounced”. Words DO things. And naming is what gods do with language. The act of naming simultaneously creates and consecrates. It settles us into a recognizable form that is real to others, even if it alienates us from being free. The provocations of language are the sexiest form of entanglement to me. To ‘forge’ is to make from metal, but it is also to fake a signature, to pretend to be someone else with a pen. What does that make ‘me’?
Your native tongue, Romanian, and the pronunciation of words in English versus Romanian are omnipresent themes, especially in “I nominate the Kudzu to Keep Secrets,” in which your surname as pronounced by your mother and as pronounced in American English are rendered phonetically. How does your bilingualism inform your vocation as a poet? Does the way that you hear and experience words as sounds have any effect on your perception of their meaning?
Words are very intense: they touch me, physically. As a teen, their effect was overwhelming; I didn’t understand how people could just say things and keep moving. Notebooks were my refuge. The feeling that my relationship to language was too demanding or passionate revolved around my fear of misunderstanding, or my need for meaning. To be named, to belong, to be part of: these words define and invoke. They call us into being. They invent spaces and places: a home, a homeland, a notion of recognizable selfhood. Poetry often turns (or attempts to return to) a missing homeland, and this idea of ‘home’ becomes a stake of emotional valence. A missing chord of sorts. A site of nuclear fission. A silence that seeks sound. A possibility that interrogates the desire to feel “at home” or to belong to a place.
“I Nominate the Kudzu to Keep Secrets” and “I Nominate the Linden to Continue Its Service as Tree of Longing and Aromatic Futility” attempted to “nominate” the trees of my youth as places, as friends— like the boys of my youth, but with roots. And poetry does this at the level of the syllable, tracing words down to their roots, noting that “nominate” came into English in the 1540s (i.e. “to call or mention by name”) from the Latin nominatus meaning “to name, call by name, give a name to,” but also to “name for office,” which comes from nomen, meaning “name.” Eventually, the English word “nominate” settled on the political act of appointing or designating a person by name to an office or duty, or else proposing that person by name for this role. I wanted to play in that division between nominating and naming, where recognition implies capitalism’s nomination for prizes. These poems were written a few years ago, at a time when I was reading Adam Zagajewski’s memoirs, and he mentioned the word “whole” as one that made a promise to him. “Whole” conjured a world of shared meaning, an end to alienation. He was intoxicated by the thought of some “whole” waiting to hold him. I recognized the homeland in my head and returned to the trees who kept my secrets.
To be named, to belong, to be part of: these words define and invoke. They call us into being. They invent spaces and places: a home, a homeland, a notion of recognizable selfhood.
Can you unpack the cover image, the disembodied tongue in a suggestive pose with a golden ring on a soft pink background? Is there a link between the tongue as the maternal language, and the cover image of the tongue with the golden ring?
Tongues betray us, and the way we conceptualize and experience betrayal fascinates me. According to legend, Jorge Luis Borges gave up on poetry after his crush, Norah Lange, trashed his poetry collection in a review titled “Thinking of Jorge Luis Borges in Something That Does Not Quite Manage to Be a Poem.” Language could never bridge the gaps between human minds, for humans could not imagine each other. Borges thought of humans as the “never-angels,” eternally isolated by words. A different way of answering this might be to sit PJ Harvey’s “This Wicked Tongue” next to Leonard Cohen’s “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” on a playlist.
The idea of the ring is given an explicit reference in “Little Things: A Ring,” in the spousal ring of Christ, crafted from his foreskin, and gifted to the fourteenth-century mystic and doctor of the church, Catherine of Siena. How do you view Catherine of Siena among the pantheon of powerful female figures that resides in the pages of this collection?
Sacrificial gestures are built into notions of purity and hygiene. What do we betray when we refuse to make the ritual sacrifice? Whom are we harming? What does the lover demand from the body of the beloved in order to secure certainty. Little things. Eternity.
The kudzu and the linden each get their own nomination poem. What do these trees represent in the herbarium of the My Heresies universe?
Possible futures. The otherwise. The syntax of Zagajewski’s sentence: “But the tree and the child seek what is above them.” Trees have been thresholds to poetry and childhood, that time where awe coexists with terror that has not yet assumed the flesh of complicity. In my early years, I thought trees could speak if one sat laid beneath its leaves, looked up, and listened. I believed this. And I still do. How does belief shape us? How do our beliefs configure, destroy, or remake us? What part of ‘me’ is essential to the speaker?
Sacrificial gestures are built into notions of purity and hygiene. What do we betray when we refuse to make the ritual sacrifice? Whom are we harming? What does the lover demand from the body of the beloved in order to secure certainty. Little things. Eternity.
Several poems, including “The Six Hens which Never Lay Eggs,” and the “Bear at Bãneasa” seem to draw inspiration from deep in the Eastern European mythic and folkloric imaginary. How does the Romanian bestiary inform your poetry, particularly the figure of the bear who makes a reprise in “On the Death of the Day of the Bear?”
The groundhog is an American way of telling time. Annually, the groundhog’s behavior on Groundhog Day indicates when winter ends. In Romania, the bear tells that story. We are raised in these consecrations and orienting myths that attempt to order time and provide a shared sense of meaning. Stories, myths, religions, ideologies all serve to orient us towards the future by telling us what we are permitted to expect. These expectations aren’t set in stone but generated from the conditions of varying geographies and languages. One could say the ‘local conditions’ are multiple for me. The sky is the only country that makes space for it.
In many of these poems, perhaps most apparently in “Cosmologies,” you entertain the ghosts of poets alongside cultural theorists—Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, Svetlana Boym, Ewa Lipska, to name a few. What is the relationship between poetry and cultural theory? Can poetry do the work of cultural theory and vice versa?
Literature has always done the work of theorizing culture, even as it creates or alters it. Any story of origins is both literary and theoretical. “Cosmology”, for example, designates an account or theory of the universe. The word comes from French cosmologie or modern Latin cosmologia, from Greek kosmos ‘order or world’ + -logia ‘discourse’. Cosmology is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe.
For me, a poem is an experimental situation that deals with the material of human existence. Words and form create the conditions and limitations of the experiments. We want to understand what happens across time– what is changed and what remains constant; there is a physics to poetry. The trajectory of a particle doesn’t exist until it is realized in the human act of measuring it. Ultimately, that trajectory merely marks the path we choose to measure: it is, in essence, a story about us. A story about how we see things. In experimental situations that involve electrons, the scientists running the experiment never actually see the particles themselves. Instead, they see a difference between the energy state of a thing before and after. Like love, there is the inability to observe the subject: only its effects on the electrons allow us to deduce its existence.
In “The Kraków Nude,” you write “Proudly, I wore the plenitude of my divine crimes across my chest.” These “crimes” include an abortion and an intentional miscarriage. What is at stake for you in broaching the topic of abortion, particularly considering that you reside in post-Dobbs Alabama, a state that has some of the strictest abortion laws in the country?
To be in this body and speak from its experience is accompanied by the hyperawareness of a performance that makes me more (or less) legible, a way of existing publicly that is interpreted by the eyes of others. I’m intrigued by what Leo Bersani called “self-shattering,” a breaking open that doesn’t reconstitute or produce a stable self. Above all, an “I” is self-conscious. Gurlesque poetics takes the lyric “I” and plays into this performative aspect.
I suspect the hyper-commodification of identity makes it hard to talk about authenticity, hard to embody sincerity if this is equated with innocence. And look: embodiment is complicated by our desperation to belong somewhere. Late capitalism depends on creating norms that replace traditional placehood, as queer theorists have noted. What Lauren Berlant called a “constant pressure for negating social location” increases our attachment to “soft hierarchies of inequality” to give us a sense of place in the world. Status, power, privilege: all these goods are assorted and distributed in varying ways. Neoliberalism depends on embracing “precarity as the condition of being and belonging,” to quote Berlant. Natalist policies emphasize the gendered role of incubating and birthing babies. Even as surrogacy increases, the price of pregnancy is difficult to discuss, partly because its cost on the child-bearer is rarely acknowledged as such. Pregnancy hovers in that space of what Berlant called a “long-term problem of embodiment” for capitalism, a problem to which we respond by foregrounding bio-power. “One’s singularity includes the kind of thing one appears to be to others,” Berlant said of misunderstanding tone, response, and affect across time and culture. I wanted to explore emotional authenticity under these conditions of affective illegibility. How can an aesthetic response refuse shame? Ultimately, I wanted to be honest about my shamelessness.
Your poems draw fodder from such diverse sources: lullabies by the contemporary indie singer Neko Case and quotes apocryphally attributed to the aviator Amelia Earhart, to name a few. Can you speak at all to the sensibility that informs your choice of sources for the poems in this collection?
“How neatly you make one thing be in many places at the same time!” Parmenides said to the young Socrates in Athens. Those words are copied in black ink on the cover of my current notebook. Parmenides showed Socrates the blind spot in the picture of reality that humans created, a paradox that occurs in that instant of time when something— a particle, an atom, a person, a cup— has to be perfectly identical to itself in space and time in order to be the thing that changes and yet, simultaneously somehow different in order to remain the thing that has not changed at all.
Parmenides, poetry, philosophy connect for me. They plug into my curiosity about what it means to live and to know. Taking the poem as an experiment bounded by constraints and conditions, one is deprived of particular forms of security and stability. One can play with intractable things through juxtaposition. One can saddle a paradox and ride it into the sunset. One can drink tea on the moon with the writers who provoke and fascinate. One can be sincere in her incoherences.
Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet gave me permission to poem the heresies of self-negation. “Paradox is what takes shape on the sensitized plate of the poem, a negative picture from which positive pictures can be created,” writes Carson. Although we perceive the poem differently, eros creates tension in self-contradiction. “Love and hate converge within erotic desire,” to quote Carson. Her influence meets that of Einstein, near that fantastic moment when Einstein asked the physicists of quantum mechanics if they believed that the moon also ceased to exist when it was being observed. David Merwin would reply: “The Moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks.” This was unbearable for Einstein, who couldn’t bring himself to abandon determinism at the atomic level. Quantum mechanics landed in undecidability, and he could not accept this. Physics could not be a surrealist game of chance to him: it had to have a reason, an explanation, a way of allowing us to predict the future. Einstein’s “c”, for example, is a limit on observable reality. C is the speed limit at which time, as we measure it, stands still. My heresies couldn’t resist playing for that middle C.
I wanted to explore emotional authenticity under these conditions of affective illegibility. How can an aesthetic response refuse shame? Ultimately, I wanted to be honest about my shamelessness.
Two terms seem to haunt this collection—defection and heresy: Soviet and Eastern Bloc defectors who evaded strict border control to flee communist states, and heretics like Joan of Arc who were burnt at the stake, her ashes scattered in the Seine, for the crime of recanting her confession. What is the relationship between political desertion (defection) and religious apostasy (heresy)? How do these terms inform not only your biography but also your sensibility as a politically engaged writer, navigating ultra-contemporary themes like the rise of white nationalism and Christian fundamentalism?
Humans believe so many unbelievable things. We annihilate others in the name of those beliefs (see ethnic supremacy and monotheisms). I admire traitors, heretics, skeptics, bitches, mystics, humans designated as abnormal, people who refuse the terms we are given, minds that stay unsettled . . .
How we see things determines what we are looking to see. What would you see in a car going at the speed of light if you turned on the headlights? What does it mean to be scattered for eternity? How do ashes insinuate different conceptions of continuity and temporality than caskets? There are entire worlds in the “la la la la” of Leonard Cohen’s “Joan of Arc.” Morton Feldman envisioned music as an intimacy that could pick up the traces of the performer. This emphasis on traces admits a certain unfinishedness, an openness to change and possibility. Our greed for conclusiveness privileges fundamentally uninteresting perspectives. In a similar way, I think our need for security justifies intellectual and political cowardice. I want to sit at the edge of what is permissible and find words for the unspeakable. Ultimately, if I fall, I think I hope the page will catch me.
My Heresies is now available from Sarabande Books.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
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