Aza Pace’s debut full-length book of poems, Her Terrible Splendor, hovers in a space where poetry meets incantation. Conjuring the mythic figure Circe, the collection lyrically explores experiences and representations of womanhood as they refract through time, art, and myth. These considerations are touched, ever so deftly, with further theorizing about desire and poetics more broadly. Such themes move with a centrifugal force through the collection. A push-pull created by the speaker and Circe ceaselessly circling each other, their relation in constant oscillation—and while these figures might sometimes glimmer with a reflection of the other, they are never perfect mirrors. It is within their incongruities, their near-alignments, that Circe and the speaker reverberate against each other—creating a dimension where the complexity and nuance of both figures can be more deeply felt.
I recently had the opportunity to chat with Aza about her new collection and her experience invoking Circe’s voice in the poems. Our conversation moved through questions of ekphrasis, persona, and the power of the peripheral.
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GC: An important figure in Her Terrible Splendor is, of course, the witch-goddess Circe, and I’m curious how your process of writing poems around this figure came about. Which came first, the Circe poems or the concept for the book? What was that negotiation like?
Aza: I think I've always been interested in reimagining or retelling stories that I've inherited from various places. I had D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths when I was a kid, so I was already interested in where we get the stories that we have handed down to us and why they do or don't fit, you know, what we need in the present. And I've also always been interested in witchiness as a source of power and finding oneself. To me, it means being able to rely on something inside you as opposed to waiting for a rescue or, you know, for agency to come from somewhere else. So I think that's why I was drawn to Circe. I also started writing the poems around the time that Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey came out, so I think that primed me to think about, you know, what would happen if I tried to retell some of these stories in different ways. Obviously, translation is a different kind of project, but I was still interested in how the story might be different from Circe’s perspective.
GC: The collection is able to refract the figure of Circe in a way that is so engaging and multifaceted. What about the figure of Circe allows her to be a hinge for the themes of the book (such as representations of femininity, coming of age, desire, and witchcraft)? What about her as a figure drew you in?
Aza: I wanted to think about ways of coming of age that differed from some of the ones that I had inherited. Primarily the Persephone version, which is mostly about loss—and I do think there’s something potentially true in that story. But I wanted to think about coming of age as an act of agency—something I can go do. How do I come of age as a person and as an artist? Is that something that Circe can maybe teach me? Her magic is very physical and embodied. She befriends animals, she makes potions. I was interested in that as kind of a point of contact with Circe and that’s part of why I chose her instead of another witch figure.
In terms of, like, representations through art, I’m interested in which parts of her seem dangerous and which parts of her seem welcoming or safe, and how those representations might change over time. And so I wanted to explore the variety of roles she could inhabit—so that she wasn’t just one type of figure. She's not just a muse or a mentor. She also offered a way, and I guess this is sort of dramatized in the book, for me to have a mask to put on. I think in my general state, I find it kind of difficult to write about desire or intensity. I wanted to confront that in this book, but in order to do that, I needed to have multiple voices. I didn't think that only my voice was going to work. One of the earliest pieces of feedback on the book I got from my professor when I started writing the Circe poems was that I needed to make Circe sound different from myself. So that was part of my thinking, trying to get to at least two distinctive voices in there as a way to think about, you know, how we present ourselves, how we confront desire, and how we confront beauty.
GC: Many of the poems inhabit modes of persona and ventriloquism, blurring the line between summoning and inhabiting a voice which both is and isn’t one’s own. Circe and the speaker seem to reverberate off one another—their frequencies don’t quite harmonize, and consequently there is so much richness and complexity in the discord. How were you thinking about the relationship between the voice of the speaker and Circe’s voice in the collection?
Aza: On a practical level, especially with the persona poems, I spent a lot of time reading out loud and seeing if I could physically change my voice. Like, could I sound different? What happens if I just change the way I talk? And I think that helped me figure out differences in syntax and rhythms of speech I normally fall into. I could escape some of those tendencies by trying to sound different out loud. For me, that was a really interesting element of writing persona.
GC: Before working on the Circe poems, were you in a practice of reading aloud as you compose? What is your relationship with voicing the poems and writing the poems?
Aza: I would read them aloud as I was writing them, but I think I was testing for something else. I think I was testing to see if it sounded like me, and that would normally be good. Whereas, when inhabiting Circe’s voice, I was testing to see if it sounded like me and then trying to figure out what that meant so I could change it to sound more like Circe.
GC: What is the difference between summoning a voice and inhabiting a voice?
Aza: I think of the tradition of invoking a muse.You have to summon this sort of state of mind. That’s part of it for me. In a literal narrative sense, the book summons Circe at the beginning. But I think, too, as the book goes on, I was trying to make that change from summoning to inhabiting. If I can conjure this character, can I make that part of myself? Can this human speaker in the book start to take on whatever aspect that's powerful or useful or, you know, engaging about Circe? And can that be something more than just pretend? Like, can you actually become something by summoning this kind of presence?
GC: It’s exciting to see the tension between summoning and inhabiting build throughout the book’s four sections (“Apparitions,” “Transformations,” “Pleasures,” and “Becomings”). How did these frames emerge? How do you see these frames in dialogue with the concerns of the collection?
Aza: They kind of go in chronological order of growing up with Circe as a presence. She arrives in the first section, “Apparitions,” and seems more like a kind of muse or something that's being studied. There's still some distance, I think, there. And then in “Transformations,” she's more like a friend. This human speaker is a child for part of that section and is starting to grow up. And then in “Pleasures” it starts to get more complicated. The speaker's becoming more witch-like. But Circe's also sort of a potential lover, alter ego kind of figure. And then the end of the collection, “Becomings,” is sort of trying to take on that voice. Since Circe has an inconsistent personality in this book, and I'm looking at her in a lot of ways, I needed to make use of plot a little bit. Which is really not my usual way of thinking. I found it difficult to think about ordering the poems because I wasn't sure if they should sort of, you know, move back and forth referentially or if they should build a kind of plot. And so I eventually arrived at thinking about the poems as moving through the different stages of why the speaker might need Circe around. That approach also helped me push against Circe only being read metaphorically. I want her to be really there appearing in the book.
GC: That idea of appearance, and the action of looking and seeing, is another important aspect of the collection. There is an exquisite attention to the visual in these poems. Two words that struck me in relation to this interest are “gaze,” which is a term wrestled with throughout the poems, and “glimpse” which pops up in a couple poems. I’m wondering if you might elaborate on your own relationship to these modes of looking—in this collection and in your poetics more broadly.
Aza: I think some of it came through because I was interested in writing ekphrastic poems, looking at how artworks have depicted Circe, especially ones that have, not necessarily a moral, but they have a point about them. You know, they're sort of like, look, this is Circe being jealous. Look, this is Circe the seductress. They're interpreting something about her in that way. And then I also became fascinated by the idea that there were real women posing for all of those portraits that I was looking at.
And so there's so much intense looking to try to represent and reimagine Circe every time she's in one of those images. I was interested in the idea that these representations are always going to be a partial glimpse of something. If you're imagining something like a goddess, you're not going to get the whole thing in your painting. Our perception of things like that would be minimal, I think. And so I was interested in the idea that a glimpse might be a way of getting at something true about how we experience the intensity of attraction or longing or mystery. How do we approach them? For me, it has to be pretty slant. Looking directly at it can be useful, but there’s also something really important about seeing something as it is disappearing around a corner.
GC: The collection’s interest in the peripheral is really striking. There’s an attention paid to figures, desires, objects which might appear only briefly, as a sort of glimmer in the corner of the speaker’s eye, but their impact lingers. For example, the poem “Portrait at the storm edge” situates us on the cusp of an event—not quite in the storm and yet not outside of it. A line from another poem in the collection, “Snapshots with Circe,” seems to imagine the peripheral as a “rowdy fringe”—a sense of the defiantly marginal. What is your understanding of the peripheral’s relation to this collection? To Circe? To Ekphrasis?
Aza: The peripheral is connected to how I've been thinking about what it means to rewrite or retell, especially when it comes to a myth. When I’m looking for the stories that I'm going to connect with, it sometimes happens to be those literally marginal characters. You know, Circe plays an important part in The Odyssey but she's really not in it that long. And so writing into those kind of short moments, I think is part of what I was interested in doing. Expanding the room to look at those characters that are compelling but don't really get much space wherever the original text is.
GC: Ekphrasis seems to be an important way the collection is exploring what we see and what we look for when re-imagining a figure. It’s an interest throughout many of the poems, and quite explicitly in poems like “Every Painting A Door.” Poet Cole Swensen notes that much contemporary ekphrasis seeks to “disturb and erode” the line between representation and experience. What drew you to ekphrasis? How do you see the role of ekphrasis in Her Terrible Splendor?
Aza: I think I started looking at a lot of Pre-Raphaelite artists, partially because there's something kind of storybook about them. And it's also one of the first times that a character like Circe could be represented as dangerous, but not bad. She's portrayed as morally complex, but still this kind of bizarre figure gazing out the window. Still very much a romanticized figure. And so I thought that was an interesting position to be imagining her from. But then the more I started writing them, the more my ekphrastic poems started to become experiential. They started to be less descriptive about the artwork itself and more an exploration of putting the image or artwork in dialogue with another scene from the speaker’s childhood or something—so kind of pairing two images together as opposed to describing the original one. I think the ekphrastic poems started to lean towards some of the narrative that I was working with, which kind of surprised me. I thought I was going to have more focus on, you know, investigating the representations in these artworks, which, I mean, I think I did a little bit. But it's more about the speaker's interaction with those works of art than it is about the way that they depicted Circe.
GC: That feels connected to the collection’s interest in gazing versus glimpsing, especially as it relates to ekphrastic. A gaze seems to move in one direction, whereas a glimpse, perhaps, feels a bit responsive. I’m again reminded of Cole Swensen and her concept of “glimpsivity”—the idea of the glimpse as a door swinging back and forth. As the door swings you glimpse what's on the other side, and there's this suggestion that whatever is on the other side also has the opportunity to glimpse you. It’s thrilling to experience the ways the speaker and Circe glimpse each other throughout the poems. What did you learn about yourself and about putting together a collection through the process of writing this book of poems? Any advice/tips for other poets organizing their poems into a collection?
Aza: I think if you have struck on a topic or even kind of an energy that you return to a lot then that's something to pay attention to and probably trust because it's something that holds your interest. Sometimes if you have too strict a goal in your mind—like “I'm going to write a collection now”— it puts too much pressure on it to be “good.” And, at least for me, that can sometimes get in the way. When I was growing up, I was convinced that I wanted to write YA fantasy novels. And it kind of makes sense to me now—in a roundabout way, I did come back to writing about witchcraft. The poems are not in the same form as a YA novel, and it's not trying to do the same things, but it's still asking some questions that I've apparently been interested in for a long time. I think it’s important not to filter out an interest just because you don't think it's an avenue you can explore. Trust what you care about.
