February 2024
Caesura Presents…Cynthia Marie Hoffman
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four collections of poetry: Exploding Head, Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, all from Persea Books. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. Poems have appeared in Electric Literature, The Believer, Image, Smartish Pace, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, WI.
Website: www.cynthiamariehoffman.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/cynthiamhoffman
Instagram: https://instagram.com/cynthiamariehoffman
“Conversing With One’s Monsters”
John:
Thank you so much for sharing your deeply moving poems with the world, Cynthia. Exploding Head is a gorgeous collection that should resonate with all readers, though it particularly strikes me as I also suffer from OCD and anxiety.
Though there are many themes I’m looking forward to digging into with you, I wanted to start with this major exploration. The first lines of your collection really encapsulate these emotions so well.
Somewhere off the road, a fire burns, and you are not you again today.
How does that constant flux of being “you and not you,” over and over again, impact your writing?
Cynthia:
Thank you for the kind words, John, and I appreciate your willingness to share your own OCD and anxiety diagnoses.
This idea of there being two versions of the self — the “you” and the “not you” — was the best way I could think of to establish these kind of dueling identities that happen with OCD. It’s so much deeper than just feeling “off.” OCD, as I’m sure you well know, is always looking for ways to challenge what you believe about who you are. I’m a gentle, sensitive person, but my intrusive thoughts are often violent and scary (explosions, guns, car accidents, drownings). As a child with undiagnosed OCD, it was especially confusing. Why am I thinking these horrible things that I don’t even want to be thinking? Like, how is my brain — my gentle, sensitive brain — even capable of conjuring this stuff? Maybe it’s because I’m not who I think I am. Maybe it’s because I’m secretly, at my core, a violent and scary person. In which case, I’d absolutely better not tell a soul. And I didn’t.
When I was a teenager (oh, back in the early 90s), I stumbled on a book called The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing, and that’s when I figured out that it was OCD thinking those things, not me. And the compulsions to repeatedly count the four sides of a window frame or multiply the number seven? Those things were just irritating distractions from my true self. That understanding helped me get through the next two decades, though I still mostly kept my thoughts and compulsions to myself.
OCD can be disruptive when I’m writing. The compulsions are often triggered by language, causing me to get stuck on repeating a musical phrase I suddenly recognize as having the same number of syllables as wooden planks that make this bookshelf (7 = 5 shelves + 2 side panels), or causing me to read and reread things I’ve written far beyond the number of times that would be fruitful for the act of revision. Sometimes I wonder how much I could accomplish if I didn’t keep getting stuck. In those times, I’m sad and I wish I didn’t have OCD. But other times, I remind myself that OCD is probably what made me a poet to begin with. It’s likely what first triggered my awareness of the musicality of language.
Writing Exploding Head was liberating. All the same parts of my OCD that make writing hard were still there, but I was able to give voice to them, especially the scary, violent parts I’d worked for so many years to ensure would never see the light of day.
OCD is not “me,” but it is a big part of who I am, and I think it does a disservice to my lived experience to dismiss it from my identity entirely or to pretend it’s not there. I’ve had OCD as long as I can remember. There’s no version of my life story in which I do not become who I am today because of the confusing, terrifying, disruptive landscape of my obsessive-compulsive mind. It took some bravery to break through the secrecy that had stifled me for so long. Hopefully I’ve made something meaningful or beautiful from it.
John:
Thank you for your honesty and vulnerability! Are you ever worried about reader reactions when encountering such hard-hitting themes? Have you encountered any external obstacles during your creative life?
For example, I know my own poems exploring my daughter’s gender identity, my children’s mixed race heritage and neurodivergence, as well of course my more overtly political poems, can cause incredibly diverse reactions in readers. But I cannot imagine not writing about these themes. Have you encountered anything similar or have you worried about such reactions?
Cynthia:
Most of the obstacles to my creative life have been my own doing. I was in my late ‘30s when I finally hit a breaking point and I could no longer bear the isolation and secrecy. My fear of what people might think of me was overpowered by my need to connect.
I wrote and published the poems in Exploding Head over a ten-year period. It was more a trickle than a flood, and that meant I could sort of ease into sharing my story. And since the poems don’t actually say “OCD,” I wasn’t pressed to publicly share my diagnosis until I was ready. I felt nervous about opening a window to the particulars of my weird, scary mind, but saying, “Hey, it’s weird and scary in here” was easier at first than saying outright, “Hi! I have OCD!”
I think many readers have recognized the “symptoms” in my poems as OCD. But OCD is also widely misunderstood, and I’ve been misdiagnosed, more than once. For a long time, I had thought the poems could speak for themselves without slapping on a directive, diagnostic label, but it was so unsettling when they received (or, really, when I received) the wrong label, I realized I needed to take control over the messaging around my book. So, although the poems don’t say “OCD,” the back cover of the book and the marketing materials do, and so does this interview. The more I say OCD, the easier it is to say. And hopefully the book can do some good in terms of OCD awareness. But that’s not why I wrote it.
Certainly, writing about such a personal topic risks inviting criticism of me as a person. I worry whether I’ll be judged for having OCD, for not having OCD enough, for not having done enough treatment, or for not having sufficiently recovered. It’s scary to put all this out into the world, even the relatively small poetry world. Fortunately, so far, readers have reacted generously. I’ve been particularly grateful to fellow writers who, like you, have reached out to share their own diagnoses. OCD can feel very lonely, but through these poems, I’m finding the community I long needed. And, like you, I can no longer imagine not writing about it.
I’m curious about the diverse reader reactions you’ve experienced. I’m just dipping my toes in the water as this book is launched, so I’m bracing myself and trying to fortify some bravery. Any words of wisdom as to how you’ve managed this and pressed forward?
John:
Well, no art form can please everyone, just as no conversation will always be mutually agreed upon. So, though I’m always careful about language or themes that could potentially cause any kind of triggering, I cannot help but write about things that haunt me. And sometimes those themes and experiences are going to strike readers in different ways. We all bring our own baggage into the interpretation of a poem, and emotions are rarely logical. So, personally, I just press forward. What else can we do?
In a similar vein, I’d love to hear how you wove themes of motherhood into your work. You make it clear that your personal struggles have sparked certain maternal questions and fears. How do you go about exploring such themes in your work?
Cynthia:
Having a child is life-changing in so many ways, but as far as my OCD was concerned, this new little person I was suddenly responsible for wove seamlessly into the fabric of my anxious mind. Parenthood was just one more thing to worry about, and the child was one more person whom I fiercely loved and whom OCD could stitch into my worries.
In the first poem of Exploding Head, it’s the child who says, “It’s okay,” while the mother worries. I didn’t know at the time how prophetic that moment would become for both the book and my life. The motherhood story in this book is ultimately one of practicing letting go and worrying less. I don’t think that journey owes as much to the OCD getting better as it does the ways in which this particular child — so brave and self-possessed, seemingly despite my influence — has invited me to grow.
In one poem, the child climbs a lifeguard tower. I think about that metaphor sometimes — child as lifesaver — when my kid is pushing my boundaries in seemingly little ways, especially the boundaries of my OCD. Kids have a special knack for unknowingly presenting you with exposures, which can be especially irritating and scary, but they’re really just opportunities for growth. And we laugh a lot, which didn’t really make it into the poems.
Now that I have a teenager (!) in the house, I’m finding it harder to write about motherhood. It’s this huge part of my identity and my daily life that feels off-limits. How can I talk about motherhood but also protect the person who is the reason I’m a mother? I think it’s something all parents have to work through, whether or not they’re writers.
John:
So true. As a parent of twin seven-year-olds, I find it an interesting balancing act of how much to include about them in my work. I think that’s why most of my poems that involve them relate more to my own experiences, perceptions, and fears, as opposed to describing them.
I’ve noticed a sense of purging in your work also, exemplified perfectly in the poem “Beasts:”
After some time, you realized you had to get the beasts out of
the house, so you dragged them by the horns to the farthest
corner of the backyard.
Is writing poetry a form of purging for you? Is it a way to enter into a conversation with your own monsters?
Cynthia:
It’s absolutely a conversation. So much of Exploding Head is the poet part of me talking to the OCD part. But it’s also about giving the monsters space to speak and listening to what they have to say.
I discovered Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet when I was pretty young, thanks to my sister’s obsession with the show “Beauty and the Beast,” which ran from 1987-1990. (Now there’s a show about entering into a conversation with a beast!) We had the soundtrack, which was music and poetry, and I played it over and over in the living room, first hearing the words of Rainer Maria Rilke in actor Ron Perlman’s deep and whispery voice, saying, “you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen…. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.” I heard a promise in Rilke’s words that if you listen to your sadness, it will teach you something. It was very different from all the other messages I was receiving. When everyone else was saying I should just smile and be happy, that whispery voice in my living room was saying I shouldn’t be afraid of feeling sad. Though for many years I was still afraid, those words changed me.
I first started writing about OCD in 2013. Late that same year, Eminem’s song “The Monster” was everywhere on the radio. I was excited to hear the lyric, “My OCD is conkin’ me in the head” because you don’t hear OCD referenced in songs often, not seriously. And because that song is about making friends with your monsters, something I deeply understood from years of dealing with OCD on my own. And (bear with me here), it seemed to echo the sentiments of Rilke.
I hadn’t thought, until now, to connect that song to my poem “Beasts” because that poem is about exerting control over the beasts and taming them. But it’s also a making-friends-with-your-monsters kind of poem. When the beasts start purring, “you’ll know you’re turning a corner.” It’s also, like Rilke’s Letters, a you-must-not-be-frightened kind of poem. Eventually, I place my hand on the beasts as they sleep. That’s when I know I’m better.
Making friends with my monsters is how I’d figured out I could live with OCD long before I sought therapy. For me, it means not fighting the intrusive thoughts but letting them pass (“your mind can be the water the fish slides right through”). And my ritualistic counting is such an integral part of my daily existence that I’ve learned to sort of exist alongside it, like having to go on with your day even though there’s a song stuck in your head.
And I have another kind of purging story to tell. I purged an angel from my bedroom by writing poems about him. But it wasn’t on purpose. There’s a terrifying angel that features in the book, and he’s real, or he seemed real. He stood in the corner of my bedroom every night my entire life, just silent, not moving. I’d only mentioned his presence a few times to my husband over the years, but that was it. When I first talked about it, it seemed like a remnant of a silly childhood fabrication. But then I wrote poems about how scary the angel really was, and I read them out loud to my poetry groups. I published them. Talking about my fear seemed to take power away from the angel in my room. And publishing the poems did feel a bit like getting the angel out of the house. And then suddenly, one night I realized he was just… gone.
In a lot of ways, making friends with monsters is about making friends with yourself, listening to your own sadness. And what else is writing poetry but an act of engaging with the self? I think that’s true no matter what you’re writing about (monsters or not).
My previous books are based on research and history — history of foreign countries and tourism (Sightseer), history of birth and medicine (Paper Doll Fetus), history of my own family via genealogical research (Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones). While much of the subject matter for these books comes from outside the self, they are voiced through me and are, therefore, perhaps just as personal as Exploding Head. Writing each one was an act of investigating my own obsessions, and ultimately, what I believe about the world.
John:
Given this collection is entirely prose poetry, how do you feel this structure more accurately expresses your themes, investigations, obsessions, and what you believe about the world?
Cynthia:
I’m obsessed with prose poems! For about ten years, I wrote exclusively prose poems. In 2014, I published a chapbook of 26 interlaced prose poems called Her Human Costume.
And my third full-length collection, in 2018, Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, is also prose poetry. That book has some of what I think of as “standard” prose poems (little one-paragraph boxes of text), but it’s mostly comprised of multi-page poems with lots of very brief paragraphs of text. I was enamored with C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining, which I’d read years before I ended up on a research-based road trip with my mother, and I’m sure it influenced me. I assembled the entire book collage-style. I’d cut about 50 pages worth of fragments, notes, and sentences into strips of paper, and I moved those strips around on a card table until I saw a book taking shape. Just as the press was finishing the book design, my editor reached out to confirm that I wanted it categorized as poetry. Maybe it could have just as easily been creative non-fiction.
I can’t say why I started writing Exploding Head as prose poetry except that I was still fascinated with the form. But the more I wrote into the subject matter, the more convinced I became that these one-paragraph boxes of text were the perfect containers for these ideas. There’s a built-in compression in a form that offers no white space. It mimics the dense feeling of being trapped in my brain with the relentless noise of OCD. I tried breaking some poems into lines, but it just didn’t feel like OCD. It’s cramped in here. It’s a lot.
And in terms of building a book, I liked the repetition of using the same form throughout. It was comforting to know that no matter what scary thought I was saying out loud for the first time, it would fit into the same box as all the others. It was naturally, necessarily obsessive.
John:
I wholly understand. One of my collections is entirely prose poetry also. Something about a consistent form really spoke to me for that project. You also mention “perfect containers” and “compression,” yet your wild, often natural imagery seems like it’s trying to break free from these boxes…as if they refuse to be contained…perhaps a bit like the mindset behind the poems themselves.
How do you craft these free, wilding images and how do you feel they interact with the precision of the prose poetry structure?
Cynthia:
I guess you hit on my strategy for this book — take a bunch of wild ideas and cram them into boxes. Which is, you’re right, a way of recreating what it’s like inside my mind.
When I think of there being “wildness” in my poems, I suppose there are two kinds. One is the OCD wildness, in which I’m largely just reporting visualizations that occur to me, like, “Right at this moment, an airplane is crashing through the roof,” and “It is a crisp autumn day when you get shot walking by the parking lot on your way to the lake.” And the other is the poet wildness, in which I’m crafting an image on the page, like, “Birds bomb through the air like the skulls of galloping horses” or “all the black spots on your humid heart are bristling into a furry mold.” And I think some of what makes an image feel wild is its action. I do love verbs. Things should happen in poems!
I think there’s so much natural imagery in Exploding Head because I was trying to capture the feeling of being isolated with my own thoughts. There is something so deeply lonely but also deeply liberating in being alone in nature. The forest and creek I played in as a child feature heavily in the book, as do the marshlands I passed on my drive to and from work during the years I was writing these poems, and the lake I walked to on my lunch breaks. There are only a few people in the book — my closest family.
I’ve seen you refer to the prose poem as a “rebellious” form. That speaks to me on so many levels. Sometimes I think the prose poem has thrown off so many of the rules and conventions we associate with “poetry” that it’s sort of a wild, lawless place where anything can happen. But I also think that because the prose poem has so few constraints, I have to work harder to build tension against that lawlessness with poetic precision. I still want to have the best words in the best order, you know? Otherwise, it’s just a paragraph. I don’t know how successfully I’ve done it, but that’s the urgency I feel about the form.
John:
What a wonderful and organic way of crafting your pieces!
Finally, I’d love to know what you’re working on now. Another specific project? Are you still working with prose poems? What can we expect to see from you over the next few years?
Cynthia:
I’ve been writing poems with (gasp!) line breaks. And for the first time, I’ve been writing poems that aren’t attached to any pre-defined project. I like the feeling of being fully immersed in an obsessive topic, you know, really settling in for a few years. I like to know that I’m writing a book, that I have an end-goal in mind, and I’m not just collecting seemingly random poems. Not having a master plan has got me feeling a bit lost. In my newer poems, there’s some climate change, some gymnastics, some friend stuff, some parenting stuff. I keep looking at individual poems and thinking, “But what is this poem’s larger purpose? Where does it fit?” Maybe this feeling of discomfort is related to OCD. I need to learn how to sit with uncertainty, even in my writing.
And I’ve been writing personal essays for the first time since college. I’m still writing about OCD. Exploding Head only let me say so much, and I’m discovering that essays let me work through ideas in a different way than poems. There’s more time to think. The box is a lot bigger. And somehow it feels more satisfying, like each essay can exist on its own in a way that a poem can’t — a single poem never feels like enough. For having been such an extremely shy, introverted kid with lots of secrets, I guess I now have a lot to say.