REBECCA GAYLE HOWELLand I met when teaching together at Sewanee School of Letters MFA program in Tennessee last summer. A Kentucky poet and translator, Rebecca won me over as we dug into a pile of grilled vegetables, horses swishing their tails nearby and fireflies rising from the fields as darkness fell. When I heard her read from her new book Erase Genesis, I was stunned into silence by the space she created, crafting poems by repeatedly erasing the first three chapters of Genesis using a strike of blue paint. “Erasure,” she writes in the postscript, “is most often used against texts.” It’s not what she’s doing here. Instead, she is a humble Michelangelo, seeking the statue in the block of stone. The result is a gorgeous book with an aching message about belonging to the world. It’s part of why The Sewanee Review recently awarded Rebecca with the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. In the final pages, the message is: gather together. And so we did. Thanks, reader, for gathering with us. Here’s our conversation.

    —Meera Subramanian

Meera Subramanian: Genesis in the Bible is one of the mothers of origin stories. Your book transforms the text in a really powerful way, and I’m curious what the origin story is for the idea.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: I had a commission on my desk for a new poem to honor my friend, the poet Marcus Wicker. About fifteen years ago, Marcus and I were fellows together at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA—which is to say, we share a close relationship to the very particular feeling of winter in land’s end. Provincetown winters have drawn generations of artists there for good reason: the crisp, ethereal light at 4pm; how the dunes sharply raise the horizon; the ice blocks in the ocean. During the winter that Marcus and I were there, I was writing Render and reading a lot about climate change. I’d take long walks through the dunes with my dog and think to myself, This place will be under water one day. We are walking on Atlantis. That experience changed my work. I realized I wanted to write stories that sought healing for our relationship to the natural world. Marcus and I are also both poets of quiet faith, rooted in the Christian social justice traditions. The Bible is sacred to me, but not static. If it is a living text, it is our responsibility to breathe our breath of life into it. So I came to Genesis to find out what remained when I blew my own breath of life across the English, to ask what it might want to say to us now, in this moment we’ve made. I thought I was going to write one poem, but they kept coming, and I kept following them. Erasure has always been a part of the Bible’s journey into English, through translation loss, so I don’t see Erase Genesis as anything more than another version of these chapters, a kind of translation. Anyhow, as I worked, the poems started to accumulate into a new myth, a re-creation myth, a fable about what has happened so far and what might still be possible if we remember who we actually are before the natural world, a small part of a whole.

[Sounds seep in from the background…]

When a person practices literary translation, they understand there is no such thing as a one-to-one match of meanings between language systems, especially not when it comes to literature…

Rebecca: Can you hear my dog? She just groaned, impatient with my thinking!

Meera: [Laughing]: Can you hear my turkeys, passing through the yard?! I love how you write in the postscript about how you’re seeking silence over sound, more and more, both on the page and in life. And that the amazing poets that you trained with—Jean Valentine and W. S. Merwin—taught you about finding that space between the words to elicit the true meaning. Here, you’ve erased the text over and over, and let what remains build upon itself. There’s a rupture between the first chapter and the second chapter, where a world is created and then, in just thirteen words, led by the repetition of the word “or,” you show that you can radically transform how to view the world. And then I noticed that it goes Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and then Chapter 2, and I was like, wait, wait, typo? But no, then I saw what you were doing, and I ended up writing out all of the chapters and subchapter titles, and I was just like, oh my god, the table of contents is its own poem, in and of itself. Can you talk about silence and structure?

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you so much for finding that. I did write those titles to be a poem when read together. And you’re right—Erase Genesis becomes a book-length poem, as the individual poems dovetail into each other to tell the story. The method I invented for the book is one of repeated erasure, simultaneously finding new poems from within the same source text over and over again. Another one of my teachers, my lifelong mentor Alicia Ostriker, often teaches me the ancient Jewish adage “Turn it, turn it, for all is in it,” which is a guide for how to study the Torah. So here I am turning it and turning it. I am asking the chapters what is the next true thing they want to say. The book is organized like that—Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 2, Chapter 1—to honor the Earth’s teaching on cyclical time. When you close Erase Genesis you are returned to the beginning, where things can be made anew.

Meera: So, men don’t come across too well here, and, from my interpretation, God is kind of not present at all. The Lord woman finds her voice, the trees are speaking, and the fields. I’m curious if you could say more about how you were thinking about voice and who gets to speak.

Rebecca: I don’t really write with a plan. When I’m writing poetry, what I’m doing is listening to the language; I’m listening for where it wants to go. I will find some language that surprises me, and then I’ll just sing it back to myself until I find the next piece of language that sounds to me like a revelatory truth. Revelatory to me, first. Again, I want to be surprised, I want to be taught.

Erase Genesis has at its root something I read in Ellen F. Davis’s book, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, an Agrarian Reading of the Bible. In it, she makes the point that many others have also made, that the King James Version of the Bible mistranslated the words dominion and over in Genesis 1: 26, which reads, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” I read Davis’s book when I was writing Render and it helped me understand what a massively consequential decision that was, for the translation teams who brought us the KJV to use those particular words: dominion over. Generations were attached to a belief they had an ordained right to possess dominion over the Earth. If a person feels ordained to do a thing, then they often feel they have the right to recklessness. It is a very powerful positioning, a god-like position. So we can call their choice a mistranslation. But we could also call it an import.

Meera: Is that a poetic term?

Rebecca: It’s a translation term. When a person practices literary translation, they understand there is no such thing as a one-to-one match of meanings between language systems, especially not when it comes to literature, due to the many complex systems through which literature makes meaning. So if we literary translators are paying any attention at all, we know we cannot be “right.” We can only take responsibility for a matrix of choices we must make in order to build a living English version of the work, choices that each exist on continua, which then all affect each other. I try to teach my translation students that the continua indicate there is both value and risk in every choice, that no technique is all good or all bad.

An import is one such choice. In order to bring a meaning over, we can add something into the English, but at what cost? Sometimes an import is the most respectful thing a translator can do to honor a source text, because the addition is necessary to protect the original writer’s intentions. But sometimes it can be disrespectful, a way to glaze the English with power dynamics or even just a translator’s own interpretation. When the KJV says that Man is given dominion over the Earth, the import is done so deftly, in just two words, that we are unlikely to realize anything has been added there. What I understand from Davis is that the source here actually says something more like shepherding with. To care for, alongside. This is all to say, the KJV translators chose an import that is relatively tiny to the rest of their choices—but that tiny import fueled centuries of misalignment between humans and the natural world. So instead, I am working in translation loss. I’m erasing to get closer to the source text’s source truth.

In my book’s myth, man exiles himself from the divine natural world, and he does so by wanting dominion. The story’s divine voice—which I find to be in the Lord Woman and also in the trees, the waters, the seeds, the creatures, all—all of them are with each other. They are integrated. It is Man who insists on being taken out, who insists on suffering by it. That said, “Man” here is being used in the sense of humanity, as it was in the KJV, not necessarily male-identified people. I did however find it interesting that the Lord character became the Lord Woman. And then there’s a moment of the story where she becomes a part of the trees, and they, her. That was when I understood what this story was teaching me—to shepherd with means to be tuned to the possibility that we all are a part of each other. That there really is no separation, and therefore dominion over is, truly, exile. Through it we create the dangerous fantasy of separation, which leads to the imbalance of all integrated beings.

To shepherd with means to be tuned to the possibility that we all are a part of each other. That there really is no separation, and therefore dominion over is, truly, exile.

Meera: That’s so beautiful. You were choosing to erase so much, and yet you didn’t erase this phrase about dominion over that you take issue with. Instead, you highlight it, you lean into it, you unpack it. And you transform it. And that was really powerful, I thought.

Rebecca: Thank you. One of my fellow Kentucky writers, bell hooks, spent her life writing against dominator culture. bell’s work argues that racism, misogyny, homophobia, extractive capitalism, etc.—that these are different names for the same force, which is dominator culture. All the ways we try to dominate each other, in the deep ecology sense. My family comes from East Kentucky. Because I came up around extreme extractions like mountaintop removal coal mining, it is very easy for me to see that extraction industries are both the great cause of climate change and another example of dominator culture, of dominion. I think what we are talking about now is a matter of imagination. How we shape our imagination for permission, in turn shapes our actions and consequences. The stories we tell ourselves matter.

Meera: So true.

Rebecca: So, to erase “dominion” would have been an obfuscation. To erase the word “dominion” would have protected it.

Meera: Toward the end, the penultimate chapter was so moving, rising to a crescendo…

every tree

every beast

every thing 

is life

green 

and 

good.

You really do create this other way to inhabit the world. Through this story and through this retelling.

Rebecca: Thank you. I appreciate that, but I don’t exactly feel like I can take credit. One thing the end of Erase Genesis points to is the possibility that the divine natural world is waiting as patiently as it can for us to get it together, for us to come home to the only home we have: each other. I have a few wild acres in Kentucky and whenever I’m home, all I want to do is just be with it, with the place. Increasingly, the only thing I want is to be quiet and listen for what that place wants to do and say. And what I’ve heard it say repeatedly is interconnection—which is what the divine natural world is saying in Erase Genesis too. There’s no suffering we cause that we don’t also experience, and there’s no hope without shared hope. So the story that Erase Genesis tells, well, I’m very grateful for it and to it, for what it’s teaching me.

Meera: And teaching your readers. We appreciate that, too.

Bring home Erase Genesis today.