Acclaimed poet, anthologist, and translator Carolyne Wright recently published her stunning memoir in verse Masquerade (Lost Horse Press, 2021). In the book, Wright recounts a love affair between two poets—he African-American, she white—from its rapturous beginning to its shattering end. The poems, presented in a narrative arc, hint that the relationship is doomed almost from the start, and yet the love affair, erotic and contentious, continues until it can continue no more. One of the poems in Masquerade, “Ghazal: Other Than Yours,” a passionate poem about the end of the love affair, first appeared in Harbor Review.
Masquerade is Carolyne Wright’s seventh full-length collection of poems. The recipient of many honors, among them a Pushcart Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod, and several individual poem awards from the Poetry Society of America; numerous grants and fellowships from (among others) the NEA, 4Culture, the Indo-U.S. Subcommission, and the Sacatar Foundation in Bahia, Brazil, Wright has also published five award-winning volumes of poetry in translation from Spanish and Bengali. A native of Seattle, she teaches for Richard Hugo House and for conferences and festivals around the country. A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, Wright received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Brazil which took her back to Salvador, Bahia, in June and July 2022, with another two months upcoming in 2023.
I had the privilege of interviewing Carolyne Wright about Masquerade. Here she speaks of the long gestation of the work, its place in her oeuvre, and her playful alter-ego Eulene.

Lynn Levin: How does Masquerade fit into your body of work?

Carolyne Wright: Masquerade is the most intensive, and may be the most important book, personally and politically, that I have completed, in terms of the larger socio-political issues that it confronts in microcosm, in the relationship between the couple. It is the most recent book, but I wrote and published a few poems included in this book during the years I was with this man, as indirect reflections on aspects of an interracial relationship. Throughout that time and afterwards, though, I was working on other poems, essays and reviews, and translations—all for other books published over the last couple of decades.

LL: Is this your most personal work?

CW: In the sense of its being the most direct, the most autobiographical, yes. All of my books of poetry are personal, but the personal elements in earlier books have tended to be more oblique. I would say that the poems of Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire are also personal as well as political, but many are not so individualized, and not so focused on one relationship. The poems about childhood, the pathos of the family, in various books, particularly in This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017), are also quite personal.

LL: This collection is not globe-trotting as is Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire, and it is more USA-centered like A Change of Maps. Is that right? Can you talk about you have shifted the locus of your work to the USA?

CW: This book is a lyric-narrative sequence set the USA because that is where the events in this book took place. But there is a lot of moving around from city to city and through rural areas of this country, and with each location comes the setting for a scene or scenes in the ongoing narrative. Not a lot of sitting still in those years of short-term jobs and grants, month-to-month rental agreements, and a lot of existential uncertainty! But future books of mine take place in different locales depending on their subject matter—such as the poems set in Bahia, Brasil; others set in Kolkata, West Bengal, and Dhaka, Bangladesh; and yet others that return to Chile.
As they say in the news, “Watch this space!”

LL: It seems that the events in this memoir took place mostly in the 1980s. Speaking of the 1980s, if the events in Masquerade took place (mostly) in the 1980s, how is it that you waited until now to collect the poems in a book? Also, it seems as if you wrote and published some of these poems decades ago, but some appear to be newer poems. Can you talk about that?

CW: Yes, the events in Masquerade took place, for the most part, in the first half of the 1980s. As I say above, I did write and publish a few poems included in this book in magazines during the years I was with this man. Some others sat for years in files of work in progress, while I was working on other poetry and poetry in translation, as well as memoir essays and book reviews—all of this material for books published over the last couple of decades, or forthcoming. Those other works were of more immediate priority at the time, and I am always working on more than one book at once.
It was a dozen years after the relationship ended that the "mantle," as it called itself, descended upon me: the bolt-of-lightning idea for a lyric-narrative sequence, a memoir in poetry about this relationship, along with the charge to write it. The story of how and why the "mantle" fell is a whole narrative in itself! And I worked on the sequence for another two dozen years, while finishing and publishing other books, before I was ready for it to appear. I was in no hurry to finish it—I was waiting for the right time. What signaled the right time? That is another whole narrative!

LL: You have an alter-ego, Eulene, a fast-talking trickster with a sly sense of humor. She is not at all present in these poems. Is Eulene the voice you are speaking through more currently?

CW: Eulene is not immediately apparent in these poems, but she is not entirely absent either! Check out the famous French Quarter character, Ruthie the Duck Lady, who roller-skated, and cursed a blue streak, through various scenes in the narrator’s days in the Crescent City. She makes a cameo appearance in one poem here. In fact, Ruthie may be one of Eulene’s maiden (but not at all chaste!) aunts from New Orleans! Eulene certainly made her pilgrimage to Ruthie in that nameless bar on Dauphine Street! And if you look closely at the photos of Ruthie (dozens available online!), the shadow blooming out from underneath her roller skates has a shape curiously like Eulene’s! Eulene has a second book of her own in progress, Broom-Closet Speakeasy: The Confessions of Eulene. Literary agents are vying with each other, indeed falling all over each other, to represent this book!
Just ask Eulene, she’ll tell you!!

LL: Carolyne, thank you for so generously answering these questions.

January, 2023