New England Review

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

“There’s a syllogistic reckoning that makes poetry—writing it, reading it—an act of hope.”

For some reason, recently, Dippin’ Dots popped into my mind. Those weird little beads of “astronaut” ice cream, sold in cups at the mall. 

And with them, madeleine-style, came a memory-rush of the excited, futuristic ambiance of the turn of the millennium: the metallic space-suit-esque clothing, the candy-colored translucent iMacs, Britney Spears on Mars.1 The general optimism of the Clinton economy. 

Of course, I was born in 1986. And kids, perhaps especially millennials, were supposed to feel that all the doors would open for them, that if they loved what they did, they’d never work a day in their lives. Passion, etc. I didn’t at the time register Dippin’ Dots as a kind of promise about what the future held, but something sank in.2

I bring this up because I think one of the things that characterizes my generation is a grand dissolution. (And yes, disillusion…) What seemed to be solid ground is dissolving. In addition to literal ground—the rising sea levels eating away at the edges—I’m thinking of things like the idea of a career, democracy, of objective truth, which are disintegrating into the instability of gig-economy, decentralized armed militias, and whatever’s the opposite of a shared sense of reality.3

All that was already under way, and then the pandemic came along and jet-fueled the crumbling of certainty. 

No one’s having babies anymore. 

Just Google “Millennial fertility rate” and the lamentations and listicles pile up—it’s economic precarity, debt, climate anxiety, the mental health pandemic, the pandemic-pandemic, war, backsliding of basic rights…

A promise about what the future held—

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve? And, in the absence of that ability to imagine, is it possible to hope?

Sometimes, it seems that hope requires a kind of willful naiveté, a protective heedlessness.4 But, I guess, one of the many utilities of poetry is how it helps us re-see, un-numbed and un-blindered.5 How it returns us to our world more sensate than before.

Conceive first meant “take (seed) into the womb, become pregnant,” and then, half a century later, took on the meaning “take into the mind, form a correct notion of.”6 It seems important to recognize that, apparently, we know intuitively that there’s a connection between having a child and conceptualizing, realizing. I would add that even thinking about having a baby stretches your conceived-of territory of the future, forces the mind to imagine—in practical, pressing ways—further than it feels comfortable doing. 

And poetry can think about time in a way nothing else can. In part through the collapse of it—in “Hysterosalpingography” the wiggle room in ancient roman prophecy becomes, through the tesseract of the lines, the hospital room the speaker finds herself in. We can be tricked into conceiving of vast swaths of time. Lineation instills an elasticity of comprehension. That “no one will recover” blooms broadly, anxiously into the blank space, before sharpening down into its specific, insignificant thought (“… my x-rays from the earth”) dilates the mind from the large to the small, from the big picture to the present. 

I don’t mean to say this as if I have mastered something, as if I am intentional. What I mean to say is that I feel that the form does this to me—as I fumble around in a draft, as I hit the return key like a horn in the traffic of the language—that the act of writing a poem is an experiment in feeling time and scale. 

The act of writing this poem was an experiment in conceiving of what it would mean to have, or not have a baby. What kind of world would she live in? What kind of future would stretch before her? What kind of divination—if I spread the entrails of the present out before me—could I muster? 

A hysterosalpingogram is a physically painful7 act of looking, of confronting the present. Something that you are most likely to undergo if you are interested in imagining a certain kind of future. It sounds right, in our particularly drastic, violent and bleak moment, to say that hope requires a willful blindering. Or a naiveté bordering on delusion.8

Dippin’ Dots seem now to me a kind of delusion—that an exciting future could be purchased, held, pressed against the roof of your mouth in the mall’s food court.9

Perhaps “Hysterosalpingography” seems like a very resigned poem. But there’s something hope-adjacent (devotion?) that comes with looking and allowing yourself to feel. Isn’t it the least-hopeful thing to look away, to cover your eyes—that is, to give up on it?

There’s a syllogistic reckoning that makes poetry—writing it, reading it—an act of hope. There’s a way that grappling with time—as I think one does, inevitably, in a poem—that makes it an act of devotion. That painful facing forward. This pulls against the dissolution that threatens my ability to consider the future, that makes me want to cover my eyes. 

I suppose this is when I should become “the speaker” for a moment and say that 6 weeks ago, I had a baby. 

I’m trying to finish this sentence, this essay, as my daughter is waking up. Soon she’ll cry, and time will both extend and collapse—the future arriving, ringing in the air. 

[1] “Oops!… I Did It Again” official music video

[2] “Dippin’ Dots ice cream is a cool, fun, out-of-this-world treat – but, in fact, it’s not astronaut ice cream!” 

[3] Not all of the dissolution is bad. Like, we didn’t need the hard—to some, comforting—binary of man and woman; we needed some things to blur and open themselves up to something multifaceted.

[4] “The good of this method, of any method / of divination is how it spares one / the act of looking / at what has been hauled, dripping, into the light.”

[5] “below, / doors to this world open along with shiny black exits, / unholstered… what has been hauled, dripping, into the light.”

[6] Conceive (v)

[7] Should you need to undergo this, I recommend ibuprofen at the very least, and someone to drive you home. I had neither, and it was a mistake. 

[8] The original appeal / of Magic Eye was in the disbelief in anything there / to see.

[9] Marketing, a failed CIA plot to innoculate / against letdown.

Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System (Ecco, 2019), which was chosen by Monica Youn for the National Poetry Series Prize and listed by the New York Times as a New and Notable book, as well as June in Eden (Ohio State University Press, 2016). She has been awarded the “Discovery”/Boston Review prize, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and scholarships from the Tin House and Bread Loaf writers’ conferences. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Indiana.

Behind the Byline

Rosalie Moffett

Black and white photo of NER poet Rosalie Moffett

Rosalie Moffett’s poem “Petty Theft” (NER 40.4) sparks a conversation with NER staff reader Quinn Lewis, who is struck by both the beauty and the grief in Moffett’s work. Moffett, who grew up in a canyon in rural Washington, believes poems can grant a reader re-entry into their life, and talks about what she reads that gives her that “I wish I could do that” reaction.

Quinn Lewis: One of the things that struck me most in your poem “Petty Theft” is the presence of beauty. Beauty is often a tricky subject, and I love the decision to pair “beauty” with the verb “scavenge.” Can you say a little about the role beauty plays in your writing and in your life? 

Rosalie Moffett: You’re right, the word beauty in a poem seems a bit like a person in a play admitting out loud that they are an actor. 

I suppose that sometimes in poems I feel like beauty’s PR officer, trying to point out to everyone Look how hard Beauty is working. Look at it keeping its appointments literally everywhere. But of course, in a strip mall parking lot in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Beauty needs a good PR person. 

When I talk to my students about what a poem can do, I talk about how it can grant someone re-entry into their life—i.e., a reader, post-poem, is newly able to step back into what they have been seeing or feeling or thinking with an intensified awareness. Poems, I tell them, are anti-numb. And, of course, we are prone to numbness. In so many mind-boggling ways, the contemporary landscape of events demands numbness. To remain feeling, to maintain a connection to self, to the natural world, and to keep the sea of newstwitterhorror from washing over you requires this intensified awareness. The poem is a still corner in which to contend with a crystalline image, unexpected music, an utterance—to have a moment with the kind of beauty that turns up your dials.  

So now I am perhaps way beyond your question, except to say that with a particular awareness, with the dials cranked, one is much more equipped to scavenge for what keeps us feeling human.

QL: You mention both the strip mall and the natural world. Images of nature and our (over)developed landscapes intersect in your poem. What particular environments have you lived in, passed through, read about, etc., that have influenced or found their way into your poetry? Is environment central to your work?

RM: The natural world is enormously important to me. I grew up in a canyon in rural Eastern Washington, with two biologists for parents. I spent a lot of time outside by myself. That landscape and its attendant particularities (caddis fly larvae, thistles, wolf spiders, hawks, etc.) show up frequently in my work, as well as the Snake River. The canyon had, once, a town, which went underwater when the river was dammed. The idea of that disappeared place has been a troubling wonder for me for a long time. I think it’s (excessively, repetitively) clear in my work that my urge is to look at the features of the landscape and wonder what interior it’s fostering or reflecting. 

So, the strip mall. Of course, there’s no ignoring it. Fostering, reflecting. Of course, it’s got its own magnificence, its own comforts. Nothing is easier than to say the strip mall is ugly and the natural world is beautiful—so that can’t be right. (Even though, yes, raze the strip mall.) Or, at least, there’s something more interesting to say. I mean, what is it to experience your own, precise grief as you stand between Office Max and a Ruby Tuesday? (Versus standing on some remote rock beach.) Since I moved to Evansville this fall to teach at USI, I have been driving every day on the Lloyd Expressway. And it’s such a beautiful word: expressway! It’s creeping into my consciousness, and bringing its (ugly, decidedly) billboards with it. It’s crammed in there with the caddis flies and the rattlesnakes, so of course it’s showing up in my poems. 

I’m probably straining at your question’s seams, but “the outside” is central in the sense that I don’t know how to keep it out of my poems. 

QL: Grief is certainly in the webbing of this poem, as well as those in your book Nervous System. Anticipated grief, the anticipated or imagined future life—are spun gorgeously together. Who do you look to (poets, artists, thinkers) for their explorations of grief and longing?

RM: My answer for that is Marie Howe’s What the Living Do, which she wrote after her brother’s death, as well as Ed Hirsch’s Gabriel, a book-length elegy for his son. The former for its gutting stillness and simplicity. The latter for its grappling, its casting about for a way to think in that aftermath. 

One poem that is so joyful, so wonderful, and so totally underpinned by grief that it took my breath away is “Hammond B3 Organ” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, from the New Yorker. In one of my poetry workshops, we spend two weeks reading poems on “joy” and two weeks on “sorrow” but the two are—it becomes clear—often inseparable. I’m interested in what our need is for both, or our inability to have one without the other. 

QL: Are there any modes or “trouble subjects” for you that make writing especially difficult? When you read others’ work, like “Hammond B3 Organ” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, are there feelings or subjects that make you think, “Damn, I wish I could do that?”

RM: Oh, there are loads of things that I find difficult to address. Politics. Racism. Whiteness. Gun violence. I’m trying to make inroads into those subjects and the further I get from the sort of sovereign territory of my own interior and into the fraught public space, the harder it gets. (I tried to get into a poem from the fact that the president called the people who brought the articles of impeachment scumbags and all I got from it was a string of my own, italicized epithets, if this gives you an idea.) 

I think the times I most have that “I wish I could do that” reaction is with poems that get the complexity of love right. Romantic love is another tough one, I think, and I’ve more or less steered clear of it (as a subject for poetry) and yet, damn, when it’s surprising, and weird, and has a bit of trepidation, it can be superb. I teach my intro students Mary Szybist’s “In Tennessee I Found a Firefly,” which is dark and wonderful. Just a few days ago I read Keith Leonard’s poem “Spratchet” (on Twitter, but it’s in the new Ploughshares) and, yes, it’s got its light, its delight, but something too, unsettling . . . It’s hard to figure out just how to do that. 

QL: Among the wolf spiders and landscape of the Snake River, one of your obsessions or flood subjects is the mother figure. What are you working on now, and what obsessions from your previous collections, Nervous System and June in Eden, have carried over into the new poems and/or project(s)? What new obsessions, if any, have arisen?

RM: I recently took stock of my poems since Nervous System and realized how many were obsessively revolving around the processes of the mind and the imagination, around the strange facsimile of the outer world we build for ourselves on the inside. Memory I am still interested in, but what I am trying to explore now is how to conceive of the future—which is where these juggernaut public forces, climate change, violence, injustice, etc. come to bear in the poems. We are asked in America to imagine, even to prophesy, the future in so many odd, impossible ways. I mean, consider how many ill-equipped people (myself very much included) are doing risk-assessment analyses in order to choose insurance plans? Or how many people (young or otherwise) are wagering the future’s odds against art, against literacy and against—here it is again—beauty? 

Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2019), winner of the National Poetry Series. She is also the author of June in Eden (Ohio State University Press, 2017). She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, the “Discovery”/Boston Review prize, and scholarships from the Tin House writing workshop and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Believer, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines. She is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Indiana.

Quinn Lewis, a staff reader for NER, has published her poetry in Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, and Best New Poets. She was a 2018 Claudia Emerson Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and has received residencies from Hawthornden Castle and Willapa Bay AiR. She takes care of a horse in rural Pennsylvania.

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