Interview / Jenny Molberg
Editor Lauren Brazeal Garza: Jenny Molberg’s The Court of No Record searingly draws inspiration from court proceedings and criminal investigations, showing how the criminal justice system ultimately fails women. During our interview, she offered wonderful insights into the creation of the collection, touching upon erasure—and how victims of crime are often called upon to erase themselves and their truth in persuit of justice, the banality of evil and silencing, and how poetry bears witness to the unsayable.
Your most recent collection, The Court of No Record, explores ideas of trauma and how trauma can inhabit and even erase one’s entire identity. Can you tell us more about what inspired you to speak to this important topic within the collection and/or individual poems?
In an essay I return to again and again, Solmaz Sharif’s “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure,” she writes, “After all, the proliferation of erasure as a poetic tactic in the United States is happening alongside a proliferation of our awareness of it as a state tactic. And it seems, many erasure projects today hold these things as unrelated. Still, when it comes to erasure, this very form of palimpsest, the ghost is not only death or the degradations of time—the ghost is the state itself.”
In the wake of intimate partner violence, with experiences of past trauma and sexual assault pressing their hands against my inner mirror, I found myself in court, several times, trying to articulate my Truth against what the court allowed me to speak of the truth. The whole story, the context of a situation, the big picture of the Truth, I’ve learned, is alarmingly irrelevant to the U.S. court system. It’s interesting that you use the word “erase” in this question, as I wrote many of these poems as an outcry, a reaction, and a defense of the self I knew, fighting against what a toxically masculine culture, and a “justice” system wanted me to erase of myself. In the midst of trauma, I often had the sense that I, as I had once known myself, was slipping away, buying into the gaslighting waged against me, until my own perception of reality became muddled, like I was looking at a familiar lake through thick fog.
After the events that were the impetus of this book (which, ironically, are dangerous to directly address in writing), I was left with nearly 400 pages of court transcript. I wanted to create, in Sharif’s words, a kind of palimpsest with that text, where I could write the truth over what happened to me—a complete and violent disregard of my truth, a state-supported silencing. In writing these poems, I had experienced enough self-erasure, so I wanted to insert, to footnote, to make additions to the text of trauma. I wanted to paint over the existing portrait of me, because it wasn’t the truth; in doing so, I felt that I was probably speaking towards the experience of many other survivors who are unsafe in telling their stories. I wanted to write in a kind of secondary language to anyone who had experienced intimate partner violence, abuse, and assault—to create a courtroom where we might be heard, an underground record of the actual truth.
Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil. Many of the poems in The Court of No Record explore this idea though their form and technique—particularly in the second section. Can you speak to how this evolved as you wrote the collection?
I think this question is a perfect segue from the first—in order to create a truthful courtroom setting, I had to play into the banality of its silencing, to use form and language that spotlighted its sometimes-absurd evasions of the truth, and to invent characters that embodied the relentless silencing of survivors. For example, when I wrote persona poems from the perspective of the abuser’s lawyer, I wrote mostly in misogynistic verses from the Old Testament, as this mirrored the experience of being shamed and humiliated for living in a female body and speaking out against abuse. When I wrote the second section’s “evidence” poems to capture the undocumented evidence of abuse or assault—the invisible proof of memory—I used Adelaide Crapsey’s cinquain form, a highly formal syllabic verse, to show that evidence of abuse can be proven in exact measurements, but is all too often dismissed.
The fact that I had to be careful about what I was saying—that I needed to, in Emily Dickinson’s words, “tell it slant” in order to protect myself and others—created a similar situation to writing in fixed form. That is, I needed to write from the margins of my own experience rather than in a Confessional mode—there were intrinsic formal constraints. I looked to the work of female forensic scientists, dream language, and metaphor (like the dogs in the book’s second section, or in “Bitch as Sheepdog”) to get to the heart of the violence and silencing I had experienced.
In terms of how the banality of evil evolves in the book, I was cognizant about the way the sections grew out and away from each other—the first addresses cultural obsession with violence against women, the second confronts the court system, becoming more personal, and then in the third, I adopt the “bitch persona,” a voice that allowed me to more openly rail against those damaging systems, letting a sense of humor and defiance into the voice. Writing poems like “Bitch Interrupts a Wedding” and “Bitch Under a Tree Eating Wendy’s,” I wanted to take back my own voice, inhabiting the sexist language that had been waged against me, to grapple with the fact that my own internalized toxic masculinity had led me to believe that speaking up for myself made me a “bitch”.
An overarching theme in The Account Magazine is the act of offering “an account”—of bearing witness, or carrying and offering testimony. How do you see the poems in The Court of No Record interrogating these ideas?
Lauren, thank you for these thoughtful questions and thank you and the entire staff at The Account Magazine for doing such important work—seeing poetry as testimony is integral to my own creative process, and so many of the poets I cherish and return to. With The Court of No Record, the idea of an “account” is central to the book’s existence. The great Björk comes to mind: “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.” “Lying,” or bending facts to get at the emotional truth of a situation, was one of my earliest lessons in poetry, and one that I began to interrogate as I was writing this book. In writing these poems, I sought Truth-with-a-capital‑T, while simultaneously balancing the fact that speaking the Truth about my personal experiences with abuse was not safe for me. This leads, I think, to a question about the author-speaker divide—it’s difficult not to conflate the two—but that conflation can lead to a dangerous situation for the author, which I’ve unfortunately learned through firsthand experience. How can poetry tell the Truth while simultaneously keeping the poet safe? How can writing serve as testimony in a situation where witness is a dangerous act? As a longtime disciple of the poetry of witness, the work of such poets as Carolyn Forché, Paul Celan, Muriel Rukeyser, Czesław Miłosz, Yusef Komunyakaa, and so many others (I could go on and on), I repeat Forché’s words on resistance in the poetry of witness like a prayer: “If we have not, if we do not, what in the end, have we become? And if we do not, what, in the end, shall we be?”
Poetry, unlike other forms of writing, allows an embodiment of the unsayable on the page, through metaphor, negative space, elision, and other techniques. With these poems, I wanted to embody the silencing that often occurs, personally, culturally, and legally, when survivors speak their stories. I wanted to, as Forché writes, look beyond the personal and the political to “the social”: “a place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protest disseminated.” I hope that these poems contribute to an often-silenced dialogue about intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and emotional, psychological, and physical abuse—that they both serve as testimony and bear witness to a larger societal problem. Though the subject matter is dark, in the end, I hope that readers can feel hopeful—that to write into the canyon of silence is possible; that, when able, if we can speak against the pact of silence that so often accompanies abuse, we can create a barrier of safety; and that, in confronting and interrogating commodification of violence against female bodies, the power of toxic masculinity will be diminished.
Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Having earned her MFA from American University and her PhD from the University of North Texas, she is currently Associate Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.