Poet Tracy Dimond’s debut collection Emotion Industry reads like an array of your funniest friend’s deepest divulgences, purged all at once in the corner booth of a bar–every word long-overdue. What comes out is the wryest examination of the outward through the inward–of pop culture through the lens of undiagnosed chronic illness, of feminine rage through a well-honed sense of humor. And vice versa. And vice versa again…

A woman speaking her mind is not entertainment. I just

want to sync our cycles, then paint the town with period

blood.

Break into the crime scene cleanup business to view

emotion as industry.

I sat down with Tracy (at a coffee shop, not a bar) to better understand how Emotion Industry came to be (and to indulge in her wit myself, I’ll admit)…

How did Emotion Industry end up in its final form? What’s the backstory? 

This book has gone through such an evolution. How it stands now, these are all poems that started in 2013 and in 2017, but as I continued to edit and write them, and as I got past 2017 and got my official endometriosis diagnosis, I had more distance from them, and that’s when I realized they’re all so specific with the kind of rage I was feeling. I had been writing and having this unsettling experience of my body not feeling like mine. So I decided I didn’t want to have this collection with poems later than 2017 because my voice had changed as I began to understand what I was going through.

It’s pretty cool that you still work with poems from 2013. Was it hard to go back to those and edit them while keeping your voice from ten years ago intact? 

I see the editing process as transformative and I can learn to understand more about a poem the more I spend time with the language. So, I kind of enjoyed revisiting poems; some things from 2013 are totally gone, there’s not a ton from my first chapbook because that voice was also specific to writing all these sad poems. 

Was that your chapbook “Sorry I Wrote All These Sad Poems Today”?

Yes. But when I put all these poems together–much later, probably around 2019–I’d also gotten some great feedback from (writer/performer) Key Bird, who used to publish Aforementioned Productions, who said “This actually could flow without poem titles and just be one big collection.” So, I played around with that for a while. The book wasn’t picked up for publication after that round of edits, so I took a step back and re-inserted some of the titles, but played around with using small snippets from previous poems to indicate a shift in voice or a change in what the speaker’s thinking and understanding. So those are those little vignettes…

I thought I was sick

But the thermometer said

To get a deeper tan

That brings me to my next point, actually–your voice. There’s an evolution to it in your collection. Did this happen because you started the collection off with your earlier poems and moved onward? Did you put your poems together chronologically? 

I didn’t put them together chronologically. I felt like, as I was editing and spending time with the manuscript, it almost turned into an instruction manual. So, that’s when I decided “Today is Fire” would start the collection. Then I just kept playing with the order by doing the thing where you put all your poems out on the floor and you organize them; very “ninth grade learning how to write a research paper.”

This may or may not be unsubstantiated:

I’m faking my death in time for the holidays.

People won’t recognize me, but they will scream my name.

Time to admit—

I am terrified / I am ready.

But it works! Especially when you see certain elements in your poems that kind of tie together that you hadn’t noticed before and you realize these poems could go together…

It does help that it’s poetry too. Those pages can all fit in one room, as opposed to prose, which often doesn’t have clear page breaks. And going back to your question about chronology… the last poem, Self Diagnosis. The first draft I have of that is probably from 2013; that’s one of the older poems, but it felt right to end with this sort of note of hope.

One day I’ll catch someone

setting up a highway memorial.

If laughter is the best medicine

I still can’t catch my breath

when I look at the moon.

I agree that there’s unexpected hope in your collection. There’s also humor–or irony–in how you write about society’s view of women, of femmes, how they should act a certain way, despite feeling like they’re own bodies are about to break in half. Was that intentional? 

It was definitely intentional, but what I’ve seen in these poems, as my writing has matured and I have matured, is where I can edit out undercutting irony. [Poet] Steve Matanle was someone who, early on, made a comment in a workshop; he said something like, “Oh, wow, this poem is sweet without undercutting irony.” And, I took that feedback and kept asking myself, Where do I want to do that–to undercut irony? When do I want to use humor, but when is it not serving what I want to say? I do feel seriously about all these different things. 

What does all that mean with the language? Because ultimately, even though I’m writing about all these things (health, gender, expectations) that are serious, I really love playing with language. Taking common language and flipping it. Going for sound over logic sometimes.

One of my favorite lines in the whole collection felt just like that to me: “substitute bagel for angel and you’ve got heaven on Earth”? 

That was from “Universal Truths.” The one with fireflies smears–

I loved that part too. What a visual. 

I found natural glow-sticks

in the summer.

Time to paint the world

with firefly smears.

It’s very much a childhood memory poem. I can’t get away from firefly imagery. One of my favorite poems is “Field Bling” by Ada Limon. In it, Limon writes about seeing the fireflies, calling them “field bling,” calling them “fancy creepies,” but then there’s the shift, and she writes, “It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to die.” It’s a reminder that you’re living in a body. Her poem is such a perfect mashup of memory and current moment.

There are so many “examinations” in your collection. Of your body, of your “self.” I found the repetition in your self-portrait poem (entitled “ATTEMPT TO DEFINE REALITY / ATTEMPT TO DEFINE”) really powerful, almost like you’re looking in a mirror, then looking outward to see if your reflection fits reality. Over and over again. 

[This poem] was an exercise in writing something longer and letting it breathe a little bit. I wanted to repeat what I was considering a self-portrait, and something I’m really interested in is “communication theory” and “impression management”–

Wait, what’s that? 

Communication Theory is the umbrella term for studying how people interact with the world around them in big and small ways. I was a Communications undergrad. Impression management is one of those theories about perception–how you perceive yourself, how others perceive you, and then there’s that other element of how you perceive others perceiving you, so that is going in a lot of the manuscript, but really explicitly in this poem. It was really about not being perceived in the way you want to be.

Self-portrait:

every time I look in a mirror,

every time I agonize over lipstick,

every time a television commercial sends me

to Amazon,

every time I watch you watch me,

every time I Google bipolar disorder

because I’m paranoid that depression

isn’t just depression.

Oh my God!

That’s another theme I noticed throughout Emotion Industry–others commenting on you. There’s at least one moment where someone tells you to smile–

Someone told me that, like, two days ago. I was riding my bike home from a friend’s marriage ceremony and as my partner and I were on 28th and Barclay [in Baltimore], this dude pulled up next to us at 9:30 p.m. and said, “Hey, you should smile more. Why are you out here mad at the world?” 

What the actual–

People telling you to smile like that is a big sign of a broader issue. It’s a sign of a power dynamic that still exists, that someone else is there for your viewing pleasure, your entertainment. When you’re just trying to live your life. 

I’m going to say to the next person

that tells me to smile:

I hope the world makes you feel how I feel.

Can you speak a little bit about how you wrote poetry as a woman with chronic illness? How has it affected your writing, pre- and post-diagnosis? Or guided it? 

I think, most importantly, I try to examine chronic illness carefully. The world is full of internalized ableism, gender expectations, racism – I know my experience in the chronic illness community as a cis white woman isn’t universal. I also know how I feel about being told how to feel, which is part of why I felt compelled to frame the collection as an instruction manual. It’s more of a non-instruction manual, full of feelings the speaker is trying to connect with others about.

Coming to the understanding that I’m not my diagnosis has helped me see past it in writing and otherwise. We’re full of… multitudes. Pre-diagnosis, I was full of rage from the stress and uncertainty. Having language for the experience made it possible for me to shift the focus from myself to writing more about how these experiences are about moving through the world. A friend mentioned a few months ago that they noticed how the edits of these poems have turned outward more. As a writer, I find that really important. To be able to see past the self, even while writing about the self–being able to invite people in.

You also write a lot about anxiety–an overall anxiety made up of health anxiety, of aging anxiety, of the anxiety associated with being perceived. How did you go about writing out these anxieties without activating them? Or did you activate them? 

I never intentionally activate them. I just had a lot of undiagnosed anxiety through my 20s, that came through in my poems. I finally went to therapy, and I think that helped me understand why I was feeling certain ways. [Therapy] also helped me look at the collection with distance to see what was happening in it. Now, I can hold an emotion and examine it a little more, whereas I think, in early drafts, there was just more unbridled anxiety. Now it’s more examined and understood in a different way. Go to therapy. Taylor Swift, go to therapy. 

Yeah, Taylor. Although I have to admit, I do love when other people, especially celebrities, have anxiety. I don’t mean I like that they suffer, but I like how unfiltered people have become about it on social media. 

More people are open about it. Even though I have anxiety myself, I don’t suffer from much shame. I don’t know what that means about me? I’m not afraid of writing about those topics. Lots of people experience anxiety, experience mental health issues, experience chronic illness. So I thought, “Well, I’m going to write about all of that. Because we should be able to talk about it.”

 

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