An Interview with Maria Garcia Teutsch about The Revolution Will Have Its Sky
by Dan Linehan
You might be surprised—without me even getting into the accoutrements—by who’s wearing the fishnet bodysuit with laced-up, thigh-high boots and a black leather bustier. Then again, maybe you won’t.
Either way, it is not only the legs spread open to the clouds on the cover of poet and educator Maria Garcia Teutsch’s The Revolution Will Have Its Sky that entices one to find out just who lies between the sheets.
Vibrant, imaginative, and subversive, her collection of poems won Minerva Rising’s 2015 Poetry Chapbook Contest judged by MacArthur fellow Heather McHugh.
I’ve known Maria for many years through our writing and also our time together editing Ping-Pong, the art and literary journal of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur.
After giving a presentation to her critical thinking class at Hartnell College in Salinas, California, about climate change, which is a subject where critical thinking seems to only occur on one side of the issue, I got to sit down with Maria afterwards and ask about her new book.
Dan Linehan: Can you talk about the framework of The Revolution Will Have Its Sky?
Maria Garcia Teutsch: I've always been fascinated with Michale Bakhtin's theories about the inversion of authority and the absurdism inherent in most of our systems of government—that the people who purport to be the wisest are often not and the people who have humblest backgrounds usually speak the truth. And so I like to play around with this inversion of authority, this carnivalesque idea of the fool being king. That's where it started with my reading of Jean Genet’s The Balcony—the underlined sections.
DL: The underlined sections? Can you explain that?
MGT: The collection is loosely based on this old copy of Jean Genet’s play The Balcony. I received a copy that had been well loved, and there were sections in it that were underlined. I decided to write poems based on my reactions to the underlined sections in the play. I didn't read the whole play. I just read snippets.
DL: How exactly did you use them?
MGT: It’s an architectural thing. So they provided the framework from which I wrote the poems. It’s like a puzzle. Here’s a skeleton, now fill in all the planks and boards and everything. I did a collection based on Lotería cards where I put the Lotería card in front of me, and then I would write based off of that image. I like that organizing principle. So what I did here was I took the underlined sections from different scenes much like I did with the Lotería cards. Instead of having an image that I riffed off of, I had lines from his play. Which was fun.
DL: This doesn’t seem as simple as it sounds, right?
MGT: It was absurdism on top of absurdism. Here is Jean Genet writing a play about subverting authority, how the people who are supposed to be in positions of power are really operating from self-interest and don't necessarily have the public good at hand or in mind. And then you have the people who are despised in society, the people who run in this case a high-end brothel where the city’s upstanding citizens are coming in and enacting all kinds of absurd fantasies. We see it today where we have the people who are denouncing homosexuality the loudest are often the ones who we catch in homosexual encounters. Preachers at the pulpit denouncing the very things that they are in fact practicing. And so the hypocracy in that system is something that I wanted to play with and perhaps expose.
A smile is disaster,
love, a catastrophe.
DL: So at some point this grew into a bigger work?
MGT: The cool thing about this collection is that it just came out. I wrote a series of poems, and they were all within the framework that I had established with the various characters—the Chief of Police, the Bishop, the General, the Madame, the Girl, the Executioner, the Pimp. These guys all hung out together. I did it consciously in kind of a corona style where I would sometimes take a line from one of the poems and repeat it in poems deeper in the collection.
DL: You use “funeral trick” in your poems. That was often repeated.
MGT: Yeah, yeah.
DL: Some musicians have songs that make up concept albums. Isn’t this like a concept book made up of poems?
MGT: Yeah, very much so. It’s kinda cool.
DL: The play happens during a revolution. Do the poems in The Revolution Will Have Its Sky follow an arcing or narrative structure?
MGT: Yeah, it takes place inside of this high-end brothel, but outside there is a revolution going on so there's gunfire and there's the noise of war outside the very doors where all of these scenes are being enacted. So, outside it is all mayhem and chaos and inside there is this absurd precession of a bishop who is with prostitutes trying to forgive them of their sins or a judge who is presiding over an executioner and an executionee. And of course I found parallels with our own world. As something near and dear to your heart, climate change, everything is going to hell in a handbag and we're spending time talking about a woman's right to choose. To me that's as absurd as it comes. While we’re spending the valuable minutes we have as the planet is being destroyed and all of our lives are hanging in the balance, it seems to me in our halls of Congress and the Supreme Court, they are dwelling on questions that I find absurd juxtaposed against the larger picture of poverty, war, disease, overpopulation, etcetera.
Outside machine-guns
woodpecker walls.
DL: I guess this fits in pretty well with the title that you chose?
MGT: Yeah, I'm very much a believer in revolution. And I think the only way things have changed positively in our society have been through revolutions. We have to have a revolution to overturn. We've had a secret revolution where people have gained enormous amounts of wealth and power and have inverted our social system. We have 150 families controlling all of the wealth in our country while the rest of us are being left to perish. This idea of us and them, or the rarified of society versus the majority of society, is something that I have a problem with and flesh out in this collection. And it is always in the face of death. That's the thing, it’s “one long funeral trick.” We think we can protect ourselves somehow from the inevitable. Redstone the billionaire keeps telling people he's not going to ever die. And so you see how money can insulate you so much to be so out of touch with reality and real human beings that you think you’re immortal because you have so much wealth.
An anti-image singing
to an image in a field of blue.
DL: So that reoccurring line is important not just because it ties things together structurally but it is thematic?
MGT: Yeah, the “one long funeral trick” is the idea of momento mori, death that surrounds us all. It’s like Holbein where I put a skull in the corner of every painting. The reminder that life is “one long funeral trick” is kind of momento mori. I also use “brothel trick,” which means that societally we often whore ourselves to the higher bidder. We have this with the corporate interests of the politicians, who are not in any way to be held in a higher esteem than somebody who honestly exchanges sex for money. They will do anything for money, even kill people through some of the policies they engage in. And so they, of course, are a “brothel trick” because they are whoring themselves out to the highest bidder, but without the honesty of a prostitute.
DL: So in your collection, the setting of a brothel and use of tricks and prostitutes are really integral to you for inverting the social order?
MGT: I think that the social order can do with some inverting. Some of the smartest people I've ever met have been taxi drivers. And this is true not just in the United States but anywhere I've traveled in the world. They speak some mad philosophy. It's my interaction with people who have no education and hearing some real wisdom verses people who are super highly educated. I think we have lost the ability to hear. We are not allowing the voices of the masses to be heard—that is regular people. Or if we are, it's the most ignorant. It's like William Butler Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming,” where he says that the people who have the least to say speak the loudest and the people who we should really be listening to are the ones who we are not hearing. I think that's true.
Hours termite
into hollow trees.
DL: You also use some reoccurring object as symbols in the poems?
MGT: I have a lot of mirrors in there and tatters and shards. That’s the whole idea of the breaking apart of society. Especially in the title piece “The Revolution Will Have Its Sky,” I talk about generals giving “last orders to last men” and “a bullet demands a target trick.” It seems to me that’s where we're at now. I mean this tragedy that just unfolded in Paris and in Beirut and in Kenya. It's horrible and it seems that as long as we have bullets then we're going to have to have targets. I think that is something that we need to reexamine—the amount of violence we have in this world and the sanctioned violence that we ourselves in this country engaged in. I think it needs to be relooked at and reordered. So, I would like to see an inversion of authority in that regard because I think there's something patently wrong with the system of government that is run through corporations, through the National Rifle Association, and through everybody except for the people who it’s supposed to serve.
Maria Garcia Teutsch’s collection, The Revolution Will Have its Sky, won the 2016 Minerva Rising chapbook competition, judge: Heather McHugh. She is a poet, educator and editor. She has published over 20 journals of poetry as editor-in-chief of the Homestead Review, published by Hartnell College in Salinas, and Ping-Pong journal of art and literature, published by the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California, where she serves as poet-in-residence. She teaches poetry and creative writing online. She serves as president of the board of the Henry Miller Memorial Library, and is the founder and EIC of Ping-Pong Free Press. She is on the faculty at Hartnell College.
The Judge’s Girl
Snaps
her stuffed purse shut
as she struts away.
Boots echo off mirrors
of mirrors. Stripes drip on
wood. The judge wants
screaming. The chandelier
collides with the night in
a brothel trick, which is a
mirror trick, which is one long funeral trick.
Dan Linehan is an award-winning author and freelance writer. His recent work covers wildlife and environmental issues, especially climate change. Dan’s focus is his novel The Princess of the Bottom of the World, which is based on real-life adventures in Argentina, Antarctica, and the surrounding regions. The novel also blends in poetry. For more info visit www.dslinehan.com.
by Dan Linehan
You might be surprised—without me even getting into the accoutrements—by who’s wearing the fishnet bodysuit with laced-up, thigh-high boots and a black leather bustier. Then again, maybe you won’t.
Either way, it is not only the legs spread open to the clouds on the cover of poet and educator Maria Garcia Teutsch’s The Revolution Will Have Its Sky that entices one to find out just who lies between the sheets.
Vibrant, imaginative, and subversive, her collection of poems won Minerva Rising’s 2015 Poetry Chapbook Contest judged by MacArthur fellow Heather McHugh.
I’ve known Maria for many years through our writing and also our time together editing Ping-Pong, the art and literary journal of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur.
After giving a presentation to her critical thinking class at Hartnell College in Salinas, California, about climate change, which is a subject where critical thinking seems to only occur on one side of the issue, I got to sit down with Maria afterwards and ask about her new book.
Dan Linehan: Can you talk about the framework of The Revolution Will Have Its Sky?
Maria Garcia Teutsch: I've always been fascinated with Michale Bakhtin's theories about the inversion of authority and the absurdism inherent in most of our systems of government—that the people who purport to be the wisest are often not and the people who have humblest backgrounds usually speak the truth. And so I like to play around with this inversion of authority, this carnivalesque idea of the fool being king. That's where it started with my reading of Jean Genet’s The Balcony—the underlined sections.
DL: The underlined sections? Can you explain that?
MGT: The collection is loosely based on this old copy of Jean Genet’s play The Balcony. I received a copy that had been well loved, and there were sections in it that were underlined. I decided to write poems based on my reactions to the underlined sections in the play. I didn't read the whole play. I just read snippets.
DL: How exactly did you use them?
MGT: It’s an architectural thing. So they provided the framework from which I wrote the poems. It’s like a puzzle. Here’s a skeleton, now fill in all the planks and boards and everything. I did a collection based on Lotería cards where I put the Lotería card in front of me, and then I would write based off of that image. I like that organizing principle. So what I did here was I took the underlined sections from different scenes much like I did with the Lotería cards. Instead of having an image that I riffed off of, I had lines from his play. Which was fun.
DL: This doesn’t seem as simple as it sounds, right?
MGT: It was absurdism on top of absurdism. Here is Jean Genet writing a play about subverting authority, how the people who are supposed to be in positions of power are really operating from self-interest and don't necessarily have the public good at hand or in mind. And then you have the people who are despised in society, the people who run in this case a high-end brothel where the city’s upstanding citizens are coming in and enacting all kinds of absurd fantasies. We see it today where we have the people who are denouncing homosexuality the loudest are often the ones who we catch in homosexual encounters. Preachers at the pulpit denouncing the very things that they are in fact practicing. And so the hypocracy in that system is something that I wanted to play with and perhaps expose.
A smile is disaster,
love, a catastrophe.
DL: So at some point this grew into a bigger work?
MGT: The cool thing about this collection is that it just came out. I wrote a series of poems, and they were all within the framework that I had established with the various characters—the Chief of Police, the Bishop, the General, the Madame, the Girl, the Executioner, the Pimp. These guys all hung out together. I did it consciously in kind of a corona style where I would sometimes take a line from one of the poems and repeat it in poems deeper in the collection.
DL: You use “funeral trick” in your poems. That was often repeated.
MGT: Yeah, yeah.
DL: Some musicians have songs that make up concept albums. Isn’t this like a concept book made up of poems?
MGT: Yeah, very much so. It’s kinda cool.
DL: The play happens during a revolution. Do the poems in The Revolution Will Have Its Sky follow an arcing or narrative structure?
MGT: Yeah, it takes place inside of this high-end brothel, but outside there is a revolution going on so there's gunfire and there's the noise of war outside the very doors where all of these scenes are being enacted. So, outside it is all mayhem and chaos and inside there is this absurd precession of a bishop who is with prostitutes trying to forgive them of their sins or a judge who is presiding over an executioner and an executionee. And of course I found parallels with our own world. As something near and dear to your heart, climate change, everything is going to hell in a handbag and we're spending time talking about a woman's right to choose. To me that's as absurd as it comes. While we’re spending the valuable minutes we have as the planet is being destroyed and all of our lives are hanging in the balance, it seems to me in our halls of Congress and the Supreme Court, they are dwelling on questions that I find absurd juxtaposed against the larger picture of poverty, war, disease, overpopulation, etcetera.
Outside machine-guns
woodpecker walls.
DL: I guess this fits in pretty well with the title that you chose?
MGT: Yeah, I'm very much a believer in revolution. And I think the only way things have changed positively in our society have been through revolutions. We have to have a revolution to overturn. We've had a secret revolution where people have gained enormous amounts of wealth and power and have inverted our social system. We have 150 families controlling all of the wealth in our country while the rest of us are being left to perish. This idea of us and them, or the rarified of society versus the majority of society, is something that I have a problem with and flesh out in this collection. And it is always in the face of death. That's the thing, it’s “one long funeral trick.” We think we can protect ourselves somehow from the inevitable. Redstone the billionaire keeps telling people he's not going to ever die. And so you see how money can insulate you so much to be so out of touch with reality and real human beings that you think you’re immortal because you have so much wealth.
An anti-image singing
to an image in a field of blue.
DL: So that reoccurring line is important not just because it ties things together structurally but it is thematic?
MGT: Yeah, the “one long funeral trick” is the idea of momento mori, death that surrounds us all. It’s like Holbein where I put a skull in the corner of every painting. The reminder that life is “one long funeral trick” is kind of momento mori. I also use “brothel trick,” which means that societally we often whore ourselves to the higher bidder. We have this with the corporate interests of the politicians, who are not in any way to be held in a higher esteem than somebody who honestly exchanges sex for money. They will do anything for money, even kill people through some of the policies they engage in. And so they, of course, are a “brothel trick” because they are whoring themselves out to the highest bidder, but without the honesty of a prostitute.
DL: So in your collection, the setting of a brothel and use of tricks and prostitutes are really integral to you for inverting the social order?
MGT: I think that the social order can do with some inverting. Some of the smartest people I've ever met have been taxi drivers. And this is true not just in the United States but anywhere I've traveled in the world. They speak some mad philosophy. It's my interaction with people who have no education and hearing some real wisdom verses people who are super highly educated. I think we have lost the ability to hear. We are not allowing the voices of the masses to be heard—that is regular people. Or if we are, it's the most ignorant. It's like William Butler Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming,” where he says that the people who have the least to say speak the loudest and the people who we should really be listening to are the ones who we are not hearing. I think that's true.
Hours termite
into hollow trees.
DL: You also use some reoccurring object as symbols in the poems?
MGT: I have a lot of mirrors in there and tatters and shards. That’s the whole idea of the breaking apart of society. Especially in the title piece “The Revolution Will Have Its Sky,” I talk about generals giving “last orders to last men” and “a bullet demands a target trick.” It seems to me that’s where we're at now. I mean this tragedy that just unfolded in Paris and in Beirut and in Kenya. It's horrible and it seems that as long as we have bullets then we're going to have to have targets. I think that is something that we need to reexamine—the amount of violence we have in this world and the sanctioned violence that we ourselves in this country engaged in. I think it needs to be relooked at and reordered. So, I would like to see an inversion of authority in that regard because I think there's something patently wrong with the system of government that is run through corporations, through the National Rifle Association, and through everybody except for the people who it’s supposed to serve.
Maria Garcia Teutsch’s collection, The Revolution Will Have its Sky, won the 2016 Minerva Rising chapbook competition, judge: Heather McHugh. She is a poet, educator and editor. She has published over 20 journals of poetry as editor-in-chief of the Homestead Review, published by Hartnell College in Salinas, and Ping-Pong journal of art and literature, published by the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California, where she serves as poet-in-residence. She teaches poetry and creative writing online. She serves as president of the board of the Henry Miller Memorial Library, and is the founder and EIC of Ping-Pong Free Press. She is on the faculty at Hartnell College.
The Judge’s Girl
Snaps
her stuffed purse shut
as she struts away.
Boots echo off mirrors
of mirrors. Stripes drip on
wood. The judge wants
screaming. The chandelier
collides with the night in
a brothel trick, which is a
mirror trick, which is one long funeral trick.
Dan Linehan is an award-winning author and freelance writer. His recent work covers wildlife and environmental issues, especially climate change. Dan’s focus is his novel The Princess of the Bottom of the World, which is based on real-life adventures in Argentina, Antarctica, and the surrounding regions. The novel also blends in poetry. For more info visit www.dslinehan.com.