Madeleine Wattenberg on Mythology

Madeleine Wattenberg calls me, video chat, from her home in northern Virginia. It’s night, and shadows stretch across the walls of the eerily empty, Victorian-style rooms, and I can barely see her eyes for the shadows cast by her curly, black hair. She smiles, and it’s only fitting we are talking about the intersection of the morbid and the sensual.

“There’s something really romantic about the underworld,” she says, “We have a sensual connection to death, even referring to orgasm as the ‘little death’.”

This connection is plain in Wattenberg’s recent poem “Charon’s Obol”, published by Guernica magazine. The title refers to a tradition in ancient Greece where the living lovingly placed ceremonial coins under the tongues of the recently deceased. Once the soul of the dead reached the river Styx, the ferryman Charon would remove the coin as a payment for his services. Wattenberg repeats this gesture of “reaching into / and withdrawing” as something that is simultaneously sensual and morbid, invasive and familiar.

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I prod Wattenberg to expound on how her poem reconciles these ideas, and she laughs. Like all good poets, she’s reluctant to say what her poem is about.

“I know my intention,” she says, “But I have to meet my reader in their interpretation… When you’re creating a poem, you’re trying to set constraints for interpretation, but once you let it go you can’t control that anymore and sometimes people will get something out of your poem you didn’t intend at all.” She grins, adding, “I find that fascinating though.”

I ask, “Are you ever afraid that a reader might have a poor experience with your poem because they aren’t familiar with the mythology?”

“I’ve run into the problem where I’m familiar with Greek myths because I read them as a kid. But I sometimes meet people who aren’t familiar at all and your poem falls apart,” she says, “There’s a debate as to whether or not a reader should be able to look things up or if the poem should be able to stand on its own. I think a poem should be able to work without the reader going to an encyclopedia, but there is still room for things the reader doesn’t know. Not knowing just can’t derail the poem.” 

As we write, we find ourselves, knowingly or unknowingly, revisiting the tales of antiquity. I personally find myself thinking back to the opening passage of Moby Dick, when Ishmael, world-weary and lost, experiences the same melancholy that we are all familiar with from our aimless youths. “With a philosophical flourish, Cato throws himself upon his sword,” Melville writes, “I take quietly to the ship.” Mythology helps us in our darker moments by letting us know that we are not the first to tread this path, that once there was a first traveler who paved this trail for us, an origin story of story. I muse on this to Wattenberg.

She says, “Origin narratives are really interesting for the way they lead to world construction and what about them we can return to and examine and rewrite in order to give voice.”

“So what are you rewriting?”

Wattenberg thinks for a moment. “I think women are particularly attracted to rewriting Greek myths as a way of combatting a history of silence,” she says, “Rewriting mythology is about taking silent, passive women, giving them a voice, and showing them as real women with agency.”

Think of The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. Penelope is a character who traditionally just sat and waited and wove, waited and sat and unwove. By revisiting mythology and rewriting mythology, people who have been given passive and subservient roles in western culture can regain their place as creative agents in a literary tradition. Certain readings of “Leda and the Swan” by William Butler Yeats even give Leda agency, and while Wattenberg and I toy with the idea of Yeats’ piece serving as a parallel to “Charon’s Obol”, she finds more similarities in the work of Anne Carson. 

Wattenberg praises Carson’s translation of If Not Winter, Carson’s translation of the poetry of Sappho, which was discovered, fragmented, much of the original text. “Carson found it very important to preserve the sense of fragment instead of filling in the gaps,” Wattenberg says, “I see that as a way of preserving the inherent silence that accompanies the fragments which is not only a representation of what’s there, but also a representation of loss.” In this way, Carson preserves the history of silence that women writers and female characters have been subjected to in the West.

So what’s next for Madeleine Wattenberg? Certainly more writing.

“Part of why I write is because my mind and my experiences are just drifting away from me and writing a poem is a way to recondense, and hold everything together in a concrete object before everything starts drifting away again,” she says.

“And what will you write about?” I say, “More mythology?”

She describes to me a series of poems that examine the intersection between the seemingly far-removed fields of mythology and science.

“Myth is storytelling, she says, “but it’s also a lens though which we try to understand the origin of the world. That intention isn’t so different from science.”

“Perhaps the intention is similar,” I say, “But aren’t their methods are quite different?”

“Emerson would certainly say so. Emerson has an essay in which he claims that science, by nature, isolates, while poetry, by nature, builds connections. I would disagree with Emerson,” she cocks her head to one side and continues, “I think it’s a different way of forming a coherent narrative about something.”

At this point, after all the musing for so long on the importance of mythology Madeleine Wattenberg’s eyes twinkle and she and laughs, “At a basic level they’re just good stories that naturally lend themselves to being revisited.” 

And so they are. If you are to write, you ought to read and rewrite, and there is no material better fit for reading and rereading and rewriting and revisiting than the myths of antiquity.