My Vulnerability was Never Soft: A Conversation with Ariana Reines
"There is courage to an unsurrendered imagination."
When I adore someone, I scent them with my perfume. In 2022, after reading Coeur de Lion by the acclaimed poet Ariana Reines, I mailed her several bottles. In return, she sent me clothing she made by hand. I wore the men’s XL sweatshirt with a snake sewn delicately onto it; she wore my perfume. That was the start of our friendship.
Ariana recently said she’s “quitting poetry,” and I’ve tried to counter this with a ridiculous wish for her to write just one more book, about cars. She’s devastatingly good at describing them. I’ve included a few images of random cars we’ve seen, along with her descriptions.
What follows echoes our conversations over the years—threads of thought and feeling we’re beginning to articulate. Much of it reverberates through her new book, The Rose, published by Graywolf Press. Ariana is a genius, a poet in the purest and rarest sense, and I will never stop introducing her as “my friend, the greatest living poet.”
Enjoy.
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Marissa: Um, who is on your mug?
Ariana: This is R’s eldest son. What a beautiful child. He's about to be twelve. It’s a great mug — it’s a school photo. They make mugs from school photos now.
M: I'm really such a fan of putting photos of people you know and love on random things.
A: I like that he didn’t smile in his photo.
M: I know. He looks like a rock star, actually. You know?
A: I do. Whatever his political party is —
M: I’m joining.
A: Me too!
M: I keep thinking of the last line of your book — you fall into earth, you blossom. It brings me relief to think that so much of life is just falling into a certain place. I'm sorry, sometimes when I speak it’s really not like —
A: Oh, it’s— it’s beautiful. I’ve actually learned something about this book from my own experience of it, which is: what I want to talk about is never what I end up saying. The book is secretly about the difference between inner experience and the visible or manifest. The exteriority of it all — the intensity of love, or the strangeness of maybe not love, but just sex, or like erotic reality — something you can’t really translate into something else. And it’s trying to get at that paradox in some way.
M: Like what something is versus what something feels or appears as?
A: Kind of. Or like what it feels like, which is what it is, to you. This is very feminine: what it feels like is what it is. But a lot of our reality doesn’t accept that. You know? And also, it’s kind of funny — the last poem in the book, which is Theory of the Flower, I started it in the T.S. Eliot house. It just started falling out of me. And I finished it in my apartment with no air conditioning — it was oppressively hot, and it was this crazy experience.
M: That’s all very T.S. Eliot.
A: It’s the kind of poem that, in another timeframe, I could’ve spent a year working on. And I did actually change the final line from blossom to open. And you changed it back from open to blossom. And so I want to honor the version of the poem that you have. Leonard Cohen used to write many, many different iterations of his songs, beyond the ones we know. If you listen to old recordings, there are all these other verses, different lines. That helped me get less freaked out about the fact that I keep evolving with my poems. Sometimes where I settle with them isn’t where the public, or my best friends, or my editor settles. It’s this weird relationship — I have to keep going with it until it’s settled for me. Venus in Virgo. I wasn’t able to say blossom — like I wasn’t comfortable with blossoming yet. The whole book is kind of struggling with that idea.
M: Right. I guess I’m thinking about how you’ve said recently you’re going to stop writing poetry, and how I have a crazy puppy now, and how you moved in with essentially three children. I’m thinking a lot about our lives — how, in some ways, they’ve been similar in that we’re both always deep in all-consuming creative processes. And it’s a beautiful thing and also, in another way, it’s a little disconnected, by design. It at once makes me feel very connected to the world and myself and God and it also makes me feel sort of... I mean, I’m realizing just now how, in a lot of ways, it’s made me more disconnected.
A: Yeah…
M: But to give myself to this puppy 24 hours a day is changing my life and a different kind of all-consuming experience.
A: Totally. I relate. And it’s like — why do you even become a poet? It has something to do with wanting to live fully and intensely in your own being. There’s something about the deep and transformative experiences for the human soul that are spoken to by and nourished by poetry. And there’s also something about the poet’s life that has to do with going outside of society, even if you’re inside it. Whether that means because you’re already outside—not recognized as part of the world—or because in order to have the experiences of love and of the divine that you know you are capable of having, you have to cross boundaries, leave worlds. Going in and out of worlds is something women do. And it’s very odd where I’ve found myself, now... R and I talk about it all the time, it’s like they found a wild animal and they brought it home. Did you ever have a fantasy that you would get a squirrel and bring it into your house? And it’s like, I’m very blessed by these people because—
M: You are comparing yourself to a wild squirrel?
A: I’m like some weird crow that they saw, you know? And I love these people. My soul is protected and soothed, and nurtured by them. And loving them is like — my life depends on it. But it’s weird because I don’t think I would’ve been capable of managing a bourgeois householder lifestyle—
M: But to capture a wild crow — that’s actually a terrifying experience for the crow.
A: Thank you. It was really scary for me.
M: And I think that such a huge part of any process of real change is fear. Deep, real fear. And I think fear is really an honor and a privilege in a lot of ways, to experience.
A: It’s so beautiful what you’re saying, and it gave me goosebumps. Because it is terrifying for the crow. And also you reminded me of something that’s not only true of your imagination, like you, Marissa Zappas, but what the feminine imagination has represented in literature. Like, I’m thinking of Emma Bovary. There is an aspect of your creative life — and also your erotic life — that’s governed by your imagination. Without that sacred imagination, there’s no world. There’s no civilization. Even if the imagination is “unreal,” even if it creates fantasies about people that aren’t true, it’s how the world evolves. Through this feminine aspect of the soul. I think it’s true of people of any gender, but it won’t submit to disgusting, shitty, mediocre realities. It won’t surrender to that.
M: I’m really reckoning with this question of whether loneliness is intrinsic to that experience. And if the commitment to continue being so imaginative is worth it. Not that I could be any other way.
A: I think there might be a loneliness of the soul that doesn’t necessarily mean being without companionship, or love, or fulfillment. But to truly bring something into the world — any kind of authorship — it comes with solitude. Because you’re the one seeing the vision. You’re the one who has to bring it forward, even if you have soulmate collaborators helping you. There’s courage to an unsurrendered imagination. A solitary vision has a majesty to it — one you’ve devoted much of your life to serving. I still can’t live without a certain kind of solitude, but if I hadn’t been domesticated by these people, I don’t know what I’d be doing.
M: Yeah. The power of just a room for a woman.
A: Virginia Woolf. Unfortunately, she’s still so right.
M: I mean, yeah — even Miranda’s book is about a room.
A: That’s right. It is about that.
M: I want to talk a little bit about intimacy. So much of your book really made me consider how vulnerability is not intimacy, and how confusing that can be. Can you speak to that?
A: It’s such a brilliant insight, Marissa. Thank you. Vulnerability is not intimacy. It can potentiate intimacy, but not necessarily. This is a really brilliant statement because...
M: Vulnerability is cheap.
A: It’s become cheap. I think a lot about that word, especially since Brené Brown made vulnerability into a thing. I started getting called “vulnerable” right after my first book, almost 20 years ago — and I hated it so much when people said that. It’s in so many reviews and essays. First, they were calling me vulnerable and I felt insulted. Then Brené Brown turned vulnerability into a virtue. And then it became a CEO flex or something — like they’d tell one hard story from college. You know what I mean? And I really liked that original TED Talk — she’s a special figure in her own right. But the “vulnerability meme” became this affect of false softness.
M: And real vulnerability is not necessarily soft.
A: Exactly. Exactly. That’s what I’m getting at. There are so many iterations of false softness in queer aesthetics and fashion. But my vulnerability was never soft. I was always saying — why don’t you see how much strength it takes for me to do this? What I was always interested in was intimacy. And intimacy is unlikely in our mediated lives.
M: Especially if it’s expected to follow a kind of “speedy intimacy.”
A: You mean like — like having sex with people really fast?
M: I guess that’s a succinct way to put it. And maybe my thinking is flawed — I realize that sounds, I don’t know, sexist or something.
A: Your thinking isn’t flawed. I was just reading about how many hundreds of people John Giorno would sleep with in a week.
M: I mean, that’s the whole thing with the so-called “sex addict.” They’re actually evading intimacy.
A: Right. I think there is no intimacy without vulnerability. But vulnerability does not guarantee intimacy. And what’s missing from our culture entirely is intimacy. What’s peculiar is that intimacy often makes itself possible in unlikely ways. On the one hand, I’m in a secure and committed partnership that I love. There’s an intimacy I’m enjoying now that I’ve never known before. And that situation felt highly unlikely to me. But there’s also a true intimacy that opens itself in a heartbeat, like in the flicker of a butterfly’s wing. I’ve had lovers like that. Friendships like that. Encounters with animals and places like that. Where the whole thing makes itself known to you instantly. And it’s completely open-hearted.
M: I’ll admit I’m at a point where I feel like a lot of those experiences I’ve had, that felt like that... when I take space from them, I wonder if they were even real.
A: But I think it’s right to wonder. Because I think reality is kind of like that. I thought in The Rose I would tell everything about this man — that I would make a complete portrait, every detail. But I realized that’s not possible in a poetry book. And if I did that clinically, it would kill the magic of this person and violate his privacy in a way I didn’t want to– even though he gave me his consent. Sometimes intimacy is like that. It happens in a flash. But then the person can’t maintain it. Or another part of their personality takes over. Or circumstances take over. And you ask yourself: Was that all a lie? Or was it the truth? Or is this person the greatest living philosopher on earth or Just like a careerist asshole or whatever? It’s because we’re all living in multiple dimensions. Like, maybe our consciousness will expand further. I love Mary Oliver, but I also find a lot of her work very boring, because she’s in total communion all the time. She’s in this saintly intimacy with the birds and the ocean, and, you know, with her pure heart and the universe. And I’m not that pure. I don’t feel that intimate with all-that-is in a constant way, the way that she does. And so as a result, I find some of her nature poetry boring—but only because I’m outside of it. I don’t know if I’m making any sense. It’s like, when you’re outside of the experience—like after you have an encounter or an inspiration—and then you’re like: Was I drunk? Was I insane? Did they bamboozle me? That’s the nature of our consciousness.
M: This sort of reminds me of the line: out of practice with my own world / I was looking at how someone else saw it. There’s something about the distortion of reality for me and how that collides with someone else. Honestly, what I really love is completely losing myself. And it can get really dangerous, because it’s difficult for me to find my way back to myself. So most of my life, my strategy has been just resisting ever losing myself. And then, of course, it only builds up and builds up—and then I totally lose myself!
A: I completely relate. I mean, that’s basically what The Rose is about. That’s definitely what the final poem is about. It’s this feeling that I’m best at is losing myself. Like, that’s actually what I’m best at. But I have to be this controlled intellectual, and a business person, and a—you know—a body, and all of these other things that feel very annoying and foreign. Then I’m like, I could do this creatively. I could make this fun for myself. But it all just feels sort of obnoxious and annoyingly distorting and interfering. What I’m best at is to just be completely taken, and overwhelmed, and ravaged. And I think that paradox is what the whole book is about. And the line you quoted—that’s from the poem Cain. You can get into a lot of distortion if you keep looking through somebody else’s goggles on the world. The idea of the mark of Cain was about feeling so alienated from the world and trying to look at it the way everyone else keeps saying they see it, but that’s not how I see it. I felt like that was what would turn me evil: the idea that I could give up my view—give up my own eyes—just so I wouldn’t have to be so tired or something. It’s a paradox. Because a woman can’t lose her soul.
M: It’s also looking for answers through just… trying to keep looking. And I think sometimes it’s almost—God, what’s that word? I wrote about this in my Elizabeth Taylor essay—but it’s dysmorphic, actually. It’s like you’re trying to find the right angle to see the thing you think will free you. And I guess what I keep coming back to is sort of a cliché idea of meditation, because I think what we ultimately need to get better at is realizing life is just: losing yourself a little bit sometimes, and coming back. And it’s going to happen again. And coming back. And again. And coming back. I think I have a fantasy of completely losing myself in the grandest way possible—and then I’ll never be the same, and I’ll never have to experience this kind of back and forth again. Because the back and forth is so painful for me, for some reason.
A: The back and forth is agonizing.
M: It’s agonizing. And it’s also, I guess… just life.
A: I love talking with you because you’re speaking to so many things that are very difficult to articulate. There are “mystical experiences” recorded in some of my books—especially in A Sand Book. The end of A Sand Book has this thing that happened to me with the sun. Last night I was talking with R about the first quasi-mystical experience I had. I had always wanted to have one, and then I did. And I thought: What does this mean? Will I never be the same? Or will I be released from all the other sides of me? And gradually, things started to unfold, and more and more kinds of crazy things began to happen. Through the experience of going to Haiti, I kept thinking, I will be released from all the rest of me. Finally, I will be taken so fully… We have stories about that in many cultures. Mohammed ascending from the rock. Chariots of fire take prophets and visionaries into the other world. Angels are carrying them away. But it’s so much more interesting and complex—the going and the coming back. And I think every book I’ve ever written is making an account of that, on some level. And this is also why some people say, Oh, she’s really spiritual, and others are like, It’s too sexual to be spiritual. I still run into this problem.
M: Who says that?
A: Oh, lots of people. I’m actually speaking at a Catholic university next week—I have no idea what’s going to happen. But for almost 20 years, I’ve been running into this issue. I’m not writing a manifesto. I’m actually just writing a document about going and coming back. That movement is really hard and really painful, but I’ve decided this is just empirical. This isn’t a philosophy. Having lived through it, I know: it’s the moving between worlds—the navigation—that’s where we could educate each other better. Because certain skills can help you fall and recover. Like we talk about: the vitamins, the aftercare, the music, the books, the food. The things that can help you. But in terms of going deep into the mystery and then living in this world, we’re required to do both. I don’t think we’re going to get—maybe, finally, eventually—a chariot of angels to come carry us away.
M: That’s death.
A: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You’re freezing and you look beautiful—I just want to say that.
M: Haha, thank you. I’ve gone and come back. I was struck by how much mythology is in this book. I’ve been thinking recently about my connection to mythology, especially Greek mythology. My sister is named Athena, and my name starts with an M, like Medusa. Lots to say there. There’s a lot of mythology in my life and in my family. But recently, I’ve been thinking about how dangerous it can be to go over the same stories again and again, rather than allowing space for new ones. I was wondering if you could speak to your relationship to mythology, and why it’s so prevalent in this book?
A: Amazing. I really relate to that. I identify with the notion that on the one hand, myth feels very present, and on the other, these old stories can trapb us. Imprison the mind. I had a job teaching poetry for three summers in a row in the Republic of Georgia. Georgia is where Prometheus was born and where Medea came from. It was known as Colchis in the ancient world. Medea was the daughter of the sun, and I have this relationship with the sun that goes back to some psychedelic experiences in Mercury but that really probably come from Frank O’Hara. For some reason, the sun has been my friend in my life, and at times it has spoken to me. I’ve been afraid of this because I felt like the sun is kind of fascist and poets should talk to the moon. But the sun has really helped me. It’s been a good, friendly, father-like figure to me. Anyway, I was teaching in Georgia, which is also where Stalin is from. It’s an extraordinary place. It's extremely mountainous and beautiful, and it’s where, according to myth and archaeology, wine was invented. It's very connected to the Bacchic rituals; everything is connected to the vine and the grape. I’ve been to these dig sites with ancient wine presses. That’s where skin contact wine comes from. It’s an unbelievably lush place. And there's just this feeling about Medea that's very different. They say that she definitely didn’t kill her children. And there’s this huge statue in the hills over Tbilisi of this woman, a giant chrome woman with a sword. The last time I was there, in 2019, I had this weird affair with this crazy dude. He sort of lost it when I left, went to the countryside, and slaughtered a ram with his cousin and the local priest. Apparently, they still do that there. I didn’t know they still practiced animal sacrifice. This one night he stormed out and then starting texting me angrily “I am notb ONS guy!!!!” And I was so dumb. I was like, what does ONS mean? And he goes, you bitch, One Night Stand. I am not a One Night Stand guy. Then when he came back inside and we were in bed, he goes,youb don’t understand the Georgian people. We are wild and soft.
I thought that was wonderful. This guy was half nuts and definitely not for me, but– wild and soft. I thought that was beautiful.
M: Both can exist at the same time.
A: I think it’s incredibly cruel as well, but it’s like you could be cruel and soft. Yeah.
M: But this ties back to the beginning of our conversation. I think there’s some resistance to being cruel now. There’s a lack of understanding that there is real vulnerability in being cruel sometimes.
A: Okay, two things, or maybe three. I think cruelty is difficult to hold. We’re both Mars-ruled people. We have a relationship to cruelty where we're conscious of where it shows up in ourselves. What’s interesting to me about Medea and Prometheus is that it's like the feminine Aries. There’s severity, there’s harshness, there’s cutting, but it’s also incredibly deeply felt and very vulnerable at the same time. We’re living in a time that’s immensely cruel—immensely cruel. We’re seeing slaughter all the time. So, we want our language, we want the structures that we need to be free of, or that love should somehow be free of it, or whatever. It’s like a rose has thorns, but if we could, we would grow them without thorns. Or like, watermelons have seeds. There are all kinds of ways that the modern era seems, on the surface, to be about taking the cruelty out of things that we want to keep the rest of. But there’s something about cutting that out entirely that seems to make us even more insanely and mindlessly, vapidly cruel and destructive. Do you know what I mean?
M: And also unhappy.
A: Exactly. So, on some level, what we’re trying to put words to is the sense that, like, in the ancient world, which, of course, is a completely manipulated idea that people are making money off of in different ways—saying the ancient world is this or that—but on some level, cruelty had a place. It was inside the grammar of it, such that, yes, it’s real. In our modern lives, by trying to cut it out entirely, it seems like we’re living nothing but mindless, witless, wall-to-wall cruelty that never ends. Whereas in these archaic cultures that we no longer live in, there’s a sense that cruelty had a place, you know?
M: Right. And this idea of purpose. In our day-to-day lives today, there’s some confusion around purpose. Whereas in the ancient world, you know, even if your purpose was to go to war and fight for your country, that was a purpose. I think this idea of living with purpose has been lost.
A: Immaculate materialism, capitalism would say, yeah, that takes that away from us. On the one hand, you can live your purpose if you're outside of society, but on the other hand, you have to go back in order to live these other things that you also have to live, which are things like a body, a friend, a lover, a partner, a business.
M: I always think about the line: I wanted to give myself to the world.
A: I think you’re speaking to an irreconcilable split that is very real in this time, which is like, the soul must have a purpose, the soul demands it. It must have it. So many of the men that I was with in The Rose were men who yearned, yearned to give their lives to something meaningful and true. And there was nothing. There was nothing for them to give themselves to.
M: But you.
A: Except to me. That’s what they were showing me. That’s why we had intimacy, actually, because so many of them were soldier types. You know what I mean? Or like choir boy types—almost like they wanted to serve, like completely serve. Completely. But not in a cheap way. They wanted to serve deeply. They were willing to die for something meaningful. One of the people, this dude, had done two active tours in Afghanistan. And he was a mechanic in Cambridge when I met him. I was at Harvard when I met him. But he spoke to my soul more than anybody else that I met there, because I could feel he wanted to serve something meaningful and true. For him, serving his country, that was as close as he could get, even though he knew that the wars meant nothing, even though he knew that all the veterans were treated like shit.
There was a guy in Argentina who was like, he was so soulful. When he would say goodbye to me, he would say Viva Peron—he wouldn’t even say goodbye. There’s this ghost in Argentina, this dream of democracy that people still feel inside them, but they can’t serve it. For some reason, sleeping with me made him say Viva Peron to me. Something in him was revolutionary, but he had no revolution. The main dude of The Rose was like a priest, but he had no religion. There was nothing for him to serve except for ruined countercultures and punk bands that nobody listens to anymore.
M: I think that the takeaway of The Rose is just continuing to find ways to give oneself to the world. And I think your book is a gift in and of itself.
A: Thanks, Marissa.
M: You’ve often very kindly described my perfume as sort of like a gift to you in a difficult time of your life, and your work has been such a gift to me, too. Would you mind speaking a little bit to the connection between Coeur de Lion and The Rose? Because Coeur de Lion was the book that broke me in the best way possible and made me fall in love with your work.
A: Thank you. Well, definitely The Rose is answering Coeur de Lion, because it’s answering this dream of medieval love poetry and really this dream of love that comes from this maybe fake or made-up idea of courtly love. Whether it’s from the Robin Hood Disney movie or some other concoction that is completely fake, I don’t know, but there’s this idea of romance that haunts my heart. And that inspires me for some reason. It’s absurd, but also very glorious somehow. It has to do with wanting to seduce a lady, wanting her heart to open. And I feel like the heart is such a difficult thing for the culture to interest itself in. And I’m just really curious about it. So, they are a pair: The Rose and Coeur de Lion. I’m happy you connected them, and I love you so much.
M: I love you so much, too. I mean, also Coeur de Lion, even the title, speaks to this idea of a brave solider. That’s all we can do, just be brave. Be brave right now. And I tell that to my dog, Gogo, all the time. I’m like, “You’re so brave.” And I’ve been telling my friends that they’re brave too, like Mackenzie.
A: She’s so brave.
M: I’ve been saying that to myself as well. I think it’s just so important to remind ourselves to be brave and to remind our friends to be brave.
A: We have to be brave right now.
I wish I could read Coeur de Lion again for the first time.
This conversation felt like a treat to read. Thank you both.
BOTH OF YOU ARE SO BRAVE