Bonnie Jo Campbell’s poem, “Still Beating,” appears in the Autumn 2020 issue of The Southern Review. Here, she discusses the sacrifices of fig wasps, the sheer enormity of nature, and the decadent pleasures of poetry.
Shakirah Peterson, Editorial Assistant: In your poem, you compare yourself to the magical fig wasp. How did you come across the idea for this metaphor?
Bonnie Jo Campbell: Thank you for asking about this poem! I love figs, and my husband Christopher had told me that I was eating a wasp in every fig. There is a certain crunchiness in dried figs that is really just seeds, but each time I bit down, I thought of the fig wasp who had sacrificed her life to make the fig. I see the fig wasp as being useful and necessary for the making of a fig, and I often feel useful in this life, and I would like to also see myself as necessary. Originally I meant to write about the wasp, not myself, but then there I was in the poem.
SP: You write that the wasp “folds, curls . . . until she cannot differentiate between herself and the fruit.” The loss of self is often referenced to denote a loss of power but here, the power is retained by the following line, “without the wasp there would be no fig.”When creating this metaphor, did you already have specific themes in mind, or did they arise as you began to dig deeper into the life of a fig wasp?
BJC: I embarked upon the subject of the fig wasp hopefully, and I was rewarded when I did the research. Everything new I learned about the wasp, about her wings being destroyed on the way to lay her eggs, for example, and then her dying after laying the eggs. I saw her as an integral part of a process, her living and dying as noble and important, and yes, empowering. I thought of the way women often try to help processes along with whatever tools we have.
SP: I was unaware of the existence of fig wasps until reading this poem. I immediately looked them up and realized how small they are (about 0.12 inches). In many ways, this poem magnified them. In what ways does viewing the world through a microscopic lens influence your writing?
BJC: I think we all feel small nowadays, and we all feel huge and overblown at the same time, depending upon what our lens is, what our distance is. A new point of view provides a new way of seeing, new way of putting a thing into perspective. As a fiction writer, I’m trained in worshipping the particulars, and nothing we can notice is insignificant.
SP: You have a very distinct relationship with nature, a thought gathered from this poem and from your other works. Do you use nature as a muse?
BJC: Nature and me, we are like this (see me crossing my index and middle finger)! Actually, nature is huge and goes on and on and I’m finite and almost insignificant when seen from space, as we have already discussed. Without nature, I’m nothing. Nature always inspires me, even when it bites me and poisons me and eats my shrubs and washes away the river bank that I’m trying to protect. Nature often tests our mettle.
SP: Two of my favorite lines in this poem are, “I talk so nobody feels alone” and “I’m afraid I talk too much.” While these lines are distanced from each other on the page, I read them to be in direct correlation with each other. It’s a message that stood out to me, the idea of loneliness and existing to fill a void (of different sorts). When writing, do you consider all the themes a reader will take away from a poem? Do you write with this thought in mind?
BJC: I’m a fiction writer, and so writing poems is where I can go without a mission or intention and let myself be surprised where the lines can lead me, from flowering figs to the fragility of my own midwestern values. I’m a self-conscious person, and I come from a family of talkers, and I know I talk to much sometimes, but I usually talk to create lubricate a situation, so it’s a real-life paradox I am bringing up here. I didn’t mean to put it in the poem, which was supposed to be about nature, but there I am, wandering through, offering snacks to people, talking about myself again.
SP: This a beautiful poem that also looks beautiful on the page. Each stanza seems to curve into the next. How did form influence this poem? Was this form intentional?
BJC: Thank you for how good looking my poem is! I wanted it to look like a wasp or an ant, so the three stanzas are symmetrical. Even before I thought about how it should look, the poem was already tending toward looking like an insect, with those short lines and all, but when I got the idea, I did fashion it further. After I committed to the shape, the shape itself refashioned the poem in the final drafts.
You didn’t ask, but I’ll confess that poetry is my decadent pleasure. I think of my poems as little dolls that I dress up and undress and reshape by bending arms and legs, sometimes by having them tangled up with other dolls. Writing poems makes me feel a little bit guilty, like I’m getting something for free. You know, without filling up the whole page with words. Writing this poem was quite a lot of fun.
Bonnie Jo Campbell wrote Once Upon a River, American Salvage, and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. She was a finalist for the National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as a winner of a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an AWP Short Fiction Award. She lives with donkeys.
Shakirah Peterson is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review and an MFA candidate in creative writing at Louisiana State University. She writes across all genres: poetry, fiction, nonfiction. She is originally from Los Angeles, California, where she earned a BA in communication studies at California State University, Long Beach.