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Gabrielle
Bates by N i c o l e ta l l m a n
What role does desire play in your work? Any desire that contradicts an authoritative “should” becomes art eventually.
You are originally from Birmingham, Alabama, but you live in Seattle now. Do you consider yourself a Southern poet? If so, how does that identity influence your poetry? The South has always been, to some extent, an imagined place, inextricable from the stories told about it and told within it. I think that geographical distance from the South has made me, if anything, more Southern, not less. As for how the region influences my poetry, all my formative memories and experiences took place in the Deep South, so the roots of my aesthetic leanings, core questions, fundamental nightmares, and earliest enchantments will always lead back there.
What are you working on next? Any preview you can give us regarding themes, form, or subject matter? I’m collaborating with my mom on a short film adaptation of one of my poems (“The Bridge”) right now, which is really interesting. She’s a photographer, and I’ve been on the other side of her lens before, but this is the first time I’ve really felt like an active collaborator, rather than just a body modeling. I’m excited to see what the film becomes. In my book, which explores a lot of fairytale tropes, the mother figures are often absent, erased, and haunting, so it feels really meaningful to get to collaborate with my actual mom, who is so creative and passionate, on this iteration of one of the poems. I’ve wanted to play with film for a long time, and this feels like such a fun way to enter.
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