Interview by Michael McCarthy
Wisest is she who knows she knows nothing: a Conversation with Alison Lubar, author of Philosophers Know Nothing About Love (Thirty West Publishing House)

Read Alison’s poem “Grand Slam” in Issue 39 of Cleaver.

I first met Alison Lubar at Fergie’s Pub in Center City Philadelphia. Kind of. The Moonstone Art Center runs poetry open mics every Wednesday there. One night I took to the stage to read a poem I had written in an online workshop. When I stepped down, Alison came up to say they recognized my poem. Only then did I recognize them as the leader of the very same workshop for which I’d written it. A digital interaction became a real-world one, though I suppose COVID-19 collapsed the border between digital and real-world realms a while ago. Anyway, we met. I went to Fergie’s every week and often heard Alison read there. Their debut poetry collection, Philosophers Know Nothing About Love, draws upon their encyclopedic knowledge of Western philosophy and retells select myths in bracing, piercing, harrowing verse. This makes it sound rather heady, but it’s also a delight for the senses, a playground for the intellect, and a cleansing of the soul. Take, for example, this excerpt from the poem “Two Carbon Atoms Reunite After 500 Years”:

            I was on the wing of the last bird
            too—those nitrogens party
            until what’s left of champagne
            are sticky tire prints. I stumble
            into the metaphysical.

            Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

            Science is a shadow of the divine

In this interview, which has been edited for clarity, we discuss finding a poetic voice, the Orphic turn, and the philosophical implications of stubbing one’s toe.

Michael McCarthy: So we met for the first time at Fergie’s, first time face-to-face at least. You saw me read a poem, and I saw you read yours. One question I have for you as somebody who reads their poetry frequently is: what do you think is changed about a poem when it’s performed as opposed to read on the page?

Alison Lubar: A lot of my writing uses brackets and line breaks, and that doesn’t always translate. Actually, I don’t want to say that. I think it’s different when it’s read aloud because it’s hard to mirror—or no, honor those in reading aloud. But I think something to be gained through reading a poem aloud is a setting of tone or a removal of some ambiguity, which is in some ways a removal of some possibilities.

Michael: It’s interesting that you spoke of tone because the tone of the chapbook is the subject of my next question. Fantastic, first of all.

Alison: Thank you!

Michael: I thought it weaved together a lot of different themes and ideas, but I still got the impression of a single poetic speaker. I saw that some of these poems were first published in 2020 and 2019. That caused me to wonder: how did you find the voice for Philosophers Know Nothing About Love?

Alison: The real grounding for the voice lies in the title, really. A philosopher can’t know everything about love—or they know nothing about love. But then, if we’re thinking of that in the Socratic way—that “Wisest is she who knows she knows nothing”—then in a way she knows the most. I approached this chapbook [by] organizing the voice around someone who’s trying to figure out what that means in terms of a dawning or awakening as happens in the cave. It’s the way that knowledge is both a narrowing and expanding of the world. The speaker is really caught in all these limbos between knowledge and experience and understanding.

Michael: Is that something you find yourself trying to sort out in your own life?

Alison: Yeah. I mean, I always think of what else is shared besides the physical. Obviously, there are atoms, and I always tell my students, “Oh, you could be breathing the same atoms of oxygens as the dinosaurs breathed, and how cool is that.” But then I think about what kind of metaphysical exchanges are there that we have no physical measurement for because they’re metaphysical. We can’t know what those are. So is there some kind of larger, invisible, cosmic exchange that we just don’t know about? I have a line in the collection about “what metaphysical building blocks / have we shared to shape a soul?” What kinds of things exist that connect us to other people and that we carry around. We shed our skin cells every seven years. I think that’s true; I don’t know. But what about things that are emotional or things like memories?

Michael: We’re in some dense philosophical territory here, and philosophical ideas appear many times in the book. You hold a degree in philosophy, as a matter of fact. In what way do you think that education informed Philosophers Know Nothing About Love?

Alison: (Laughs) I feel like I had struggled with dualism my entire life! My dad was a philosophy major, so I guess it runs in the family because [philosophy degrees] are incredibly useful (pauses for a laugh). Sarcasm.

I was really trying to find answers to aspects about identity, and even though the book isn’t explicitly queer or about intersectionality—right now I’m doing a lot of writing about being mixed race—it was a lot of trying to figure out what things are and what things aren’t, trying to figure out where I fit in and who I fit in with. If we think of Aristophanes’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, that’s also in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, it was such a formative myth for me. I realized at the end of the film that no one else completes you. The speech really understands how the parts of you complete who you are because at the end Hedwig walks off with the complete face tattoo. It’s not two different people fitting together. It’s the parts of herself uniting.

I think studying philosophy has been a way to understand the world and my experience. Once I started getting into yoga teaching—and not being scared of having feelings—I realized, wow, this Western priority on solely the intellectual is so incomplete. There’s that Hamlet quote, “There are more things in heaven and earth […] than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I’m constantly overwhelmed in the best way by what I don’t know. The more I do know, the more I realize I don’t, and that’s really fascinating and liberating, rather than scary now.

Michael: Speaking of dualism, the collection definitely engages the intellect, but it also engages the senses in very tangible ways. I was wondering what role the body plays in your poetry.

Alison: The body is one way to access knowledge and understanding in a non-intellectualized way. Using sensual imagery connects the mind and the body in the same way that the breath does in yoga practice or a running practice. It’s something that draws the whole self together because even though we can imagine ourselves unembodied and say, “Oh, am I a bodiless brain in a vat? Am I in the matrix? Let’s have some philosophical thought experiments,” my stomach is still going to growl. If I stub my toe, it’s still going to hurt.

Michael: Would you consider the feeling of love to be one of those experiences like hunger or the pain of stubbing your toe in that it’s directly tied to the body?

Alison: Yeah. With the types of love that I know I’ve experienced, there’s been that love that feels like your heart’s been ripped out of your chest, and there’s the feeling that you’re being swept up. In the Divine Comedy, in the Inferno, there’s Paolo and Francesca, the lovers that are being whipped around in this wind and they can’t find each other, so this sense of love and love lost—which are two separate questions—is a warming. It can be a sense of warmth and expansiveness. I think of love as blue and calm, but the speaker in the book doesn’t necessarily experience that. They’re also experiencing the tremendous loss and absence of love. Another question is: does self-love feel the same as love with another person?

Michael: Sharing however much you’re willing to share, what kind of personal experiences informed this collection?

Alison: Names are omitted to protect the guilty, of course. But will people recognize themselves? Maybe. I want to take the Carly Simon approach—if you think this poem is about you, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. But everything that I’ve written is based on some experience I’ve had whether it’s dreamt or real or imagined.

Michael: Speaking more specifically to your professions as an educator, have your experiences as a high school English teacher and yoga instructor informed your poetry?

Alison: Absolutely. I actually only started writing seriously as I was ending my yoga teacher training because I had been so confined in many ways in my past and hadn’t felt the freedom to access that aspect of the emotive, hadn’t felt a safe creative space. With the amount of journaling we did in yoga teacher training, it just opened that little zipper or valve or plug and it started pouring out. I had always loved poetry, and I ran poetry club in school. Granted, I don’t have an MFA, I haven’t taken English classes, I’ve never taken a creative writing class. A lot of it came from the deep study of poetry in my teaching. I have to know a poem really well to be able to teach it. Learning poetry with my students is really getting into it, really scrutinizing craft. I always try to get my students to find something they love. If they say, “I don’t like poetry,” I say, “Go on poets.org or poetryfoundation.org. I dare you to find something you love.” I feel like I’m a bit of a poet-pharmacist in that way.

They’re all things that work well together and can still stand in a singular way and have a separation, that none of them is exhausting in their totality. But teaching can be . . . I’m very tired.

Michael: If I can hastily construct a Venn diagram, who are some of the poets you teach who you are also personally inspired and influenced by in your own writing?

Alison: Going back to my tenth-grade English teaching experience as a student, my high school English teacher had us read “Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note” by Amiri Baraka. This poem exploded my world in that I realized I didn’t have to fully explain something to love it. A good friend who’s a poet and a sculptor—his name is Zach Osma—has this bumper sticker that says, “Don’t let me intellectualize this experience.” I always think about that. But that Amiri Baraka poem is the first place I learned that. I may or may not have gotten a tattoo of my favorite stanza at one point. I bring my students the poems I love and am also trying to keep myself, by virtue of being a poet, on the pulse of what poets are doing. Two years ago, C.A. Conrad posted part of their shard series on Instagram, and I decided, “We’re doing this poem tomorrow as poem of the week.” So I love C.A. Conrad and what they’re doing with form. Chen Chen’s writing has given me the permission I didn’t know I needed to write explicitly about my identity being mixed-race and queer. I’ve always loved Gwendolyn Brooks. Rita Dove has an incredible two-part poem called “Parsley” that’s about the Parsley Massacre. The first part is a villanelle, and that’s a way I really love tying history and humanity to the role of poetry, which I think is to deepen our humanity.

Michael: Your collection uses many allusions to Greek myth and Christian imagery, and two that I found to have a particular resonance were one, the allegory of the cave and two, Adam and Eve eating from tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Do you see those two stories as being resonant in a similar way?

Alison: Absolutely! That’s a great observation. They’re about the warnings that happen regarding wisdom. To know is to increase suffering. There is increased suffering when there is more knowledge. If we think of Plato’s prisoner freed from the cave, he comes back and tells everyone the truth, and in some versions, they beat him to death. They kill him. Ideas are dangerous. No one wants to change the way they think. If we think of being expelled from the Garden of Eden for wanting to know things and for being curious, there’s definitely a common thread. Does knowledge increase capacity for pain and suffering? And does it do so for compassion? I don’t think so. I mean, it might. But that’s a really great connection. Thank you for making that!

Michael: The way the Allegory of the Cave was described in the book was intriguing to me because you also invoke the myth of Orpheus, which involves the famous Orphic turn which causes Eurydice to be plunged back into the underworld. I noticed the back cover quote is “If I was leading you out of the cave / I would turn around.” Is that a reference to the Allegory of the Cave or the myth of Orpheus or some concatenation of both?

Alison: Directly, I would say, to Orpheus. But it also pertains to that idea of the danger of knowledge. If you’re experiencing something with someone else, to what extent are you both complicit? Or is there someone who is more responsible than the other for that knowledge? It’s almost Adam-and-Eve-ing the connection among the three, of Eve offering the apple and Adam saying, “Oh sure!” But Eve faces the fallout. What is our responsibility to the other person in a relationship or in that experience of love? Especially if it’s something that’s dangerous or something that can’t be continued or pursued. Is it best to end it and let this be the death of something, rather than to draw out the suffering?

Michael: I was so intrigued by what compelled that Orphic turn because it’s something that Orpheus couldn’t help doing but also ensured Eurydice’s doom. That provides a lot of insight into what compels the lover to look back towards the beloved.

Alison: And he knew it! He knew what would happen, and he did it anyway. He couldn’t help himself. And therein is the question: can you know something and still think, “I have to do it anyway”?

Michael: Earlier, we talked about your use of parentheses in your poems. When did that become a facet of your poetry?

Alison: It’s always appeared in my writing. I remember being high school and being told “You use too many parentheses” and I would say, “But that’s how I think.” In poetry, I can do whatever I want, so I can use those parentheses to add meaning, to flex meaning, to add clarification. I have a poem called “Conservation of Matter” that uses brackets really heavily and essentially has two different poems in it. So it’s a tool that I think I’ve always gravitated toward. Only in the last two years have I really enjoyed using them.

Michael: Do you have any poetry projects planned for the future?

Alison: Oh absolutely! My second chapbook came out right before the New Year: queer feast, making the bitter sweet with Bottlecap Press. I have another coming out in March 2023 with CLASH!, an imprint of Mouthfeel Press. It’s called sweet euphemism and examines my relationship with my great aunt, who survived imprisonment during the Japanese Internment in Tule Lake, along with my grandfather and their mother. In fall 2023, It Skips a Generation comes out with Stanchion Books—I’m super excited to collaborate with another Philly-area publisher. Both 2023 titles are part of a larger, full collection that I’ve been working on, that’s still looking for a publishing home. I also have a hybrid work I’ve been flirting with and making slow progress on. As always, there are some other seeds, but they’re still subterranean for now.

Michael: I have just one more question for you. Are you still reading at Fergie’s?

Alison: Yeah! I try to get there whenever I have a friend who’s featured. A friend of mine who reads there just went to pursue her MFA in California, so she won’t be there. But if I can get a crew together or find a friend who’s going, I’ll try to show up. It’s a great community.

Michael: If you find yourself there soon, let them know that Mike says hello!

Alison: I will!

Michael McCarthy’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Antithesis Journal, Barzakh Magazine, and Prairie Schooner, among others. His debut poetry chapbook Steve: An Unexpected Gift is forthcoming from the Moonstone Arts Center in 2023. He is currently an undergraduate student at University of Carlos III in Madrid, Spain.