Is it true that your first poem was published in the San Francisco Chronicle?
Yes, it was published in a magazine that was an insert to the Chronicle, called Cups. The poem was called “Kill Me So Much.” It was sort of a political ode. I wrote it when I was twelve. I was heavily influenced by Jack Hirschman’s work. It really was an ode to him and his style of poetry. He was very taken with it and he was the one that was responsible for getting it published. Anybody that knows Jack, it’s the communist/proletariat in him, he believes in everyone, and believes in art so emphatically. He’ll help you get your chapbook made, he’ll take your poems to his editor, that’s what he does.
You call him a mentor. Was he supportive early on?
Extremely. He’s also a mentor in the way that he’s hurt my feelings many times by telling me when a poem wasn’t good enough. He was always right. He’s not someone to mince words or to protect your feelings for the sake of protecting. That doesn’t mean he goes out of his way to hurt, but he will tell you like it is — especially when he knows that you can do better or dig deeper. My first book Free Stallions was dedicated to him. He’s edited almost all of my work aside from Dark Sparkler.
Diane di Prima wrote the foreword for Dark Sparkler. Was she also around during your childhood? How did your connection to her come about?
Diane was always like a wild wolf that I could never quite get close to. I was heavily influenced by her poetry, and especially her memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman. That book single-handedly changed my relationship to myself as a woman. George Herms and Diane have been best friends forever. He’d known that I always had a wild crush on Diane. I think we were at Michael McClure’s 70th birthday and George specifically set it up so that I was sitting at the same table as Diane. My hands were super sweaty from nerves. We got to talking and slowly became friends.
In the foreword, di Prima writes: “Dark Sparkler is many things. It is, first of all, wonderful poetry. It is also cartography in that it maps a previously unexplored piece of women’s experience — a part of the map with which Ms. Tamblyn is personally familiar.” It’s an apt description of what you are doing in the book.
I’d been emailing Diane these poems from the book and getting hand-written letters from her (which are now framed in my house!) She doesn’t usually quote books. And she turned me down when I asked for a blurb for Dark Sparkler. She said, “I’m not interested in quoting the book, but I will write its foreword.” I almost fell off my chair. Only she could write so eloquently, having no understanding of Hollywood in the intimate way that I do, but that she could nail it on the head in the way that she did, was so profound.
At the end of the day, what she’s saying, and what she understands is that, the stories of these women in this book are not just the plight of celebrityism. They are the plight of everyday womanism – what it’s like to be projected on, no matter what field you’re in. To not believe in yourself and not think you’re good enough. To constantly be struggling against those paradigms and double-standards.
That’s how I felt reading Dark Sparkler as well. It’s a harrowing read — for the reason you just mentioned, and also because of learning the horrific things that happened to these women and girls. Like Judith Barsi, for example. I hadn’t thought about her since the ’80s. And you look up the stories and they are just so sad. What was the process of writing the book like?
It was a huge process. Some poems would come really easily. Other times I was just mad at the entire process, and over it, and wanted to quit. I did stop writing the poems for about a year. It was after the Dana Plato poem. I’d made myself listen to this Howard Stern interview that she did, where she started crying, and people were saying these terrible things to her. And then she died the next day of a drug overdose in her mother’s RV on Mother’s Day, which I also talk about in the book a little bit.
Look, it’s really hard to study your dead peers. Not just their death, but to study their pain. That’s not to say that I identified with them, because I didn’t. But I did understand their helplessness. Or, what I perceived to be their helplessness. Their suffering at not being able to get out of certain pigeonholes, to not be able to grow and see themselves in a certain light. Those things, I had some understanding of.
Going back to that cartography, ultimately, that’s what the book became for me. It was less a study or a journalistic look into these women’s lives, but instead it was about the interpersonal life of women, and how we treat ourselves, how we view ourselves, and ultimately, my own relationship with myself. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: The book is an invitation to my funeral. The me that existed before this happened was a less strong person who wasn’t totally ready to grasp what they are capable of.
In one interview you said, “Making this book was a life-saving experience for me.” I thought that was interesting, considering the subject matter. What did you mean by this?
I feel like a lot of the interviews with me have taken this out of context. The interview with the Washington Post, and the woman at the Los Angeles Times did the same thing.
I never felt suicidal. There was never a sense of thinking I wanted to die. It was more about surviving the pigeonhole. It was more “I’m going to survive the cliché that I’ve become, or that I think I am.” I didn’t know anything other than how to audition, my entire life. I did nothing else but that and writing poetry. I wanted to direct, I wanted to write a great novel, I wanted to write a script, but I didn’t feel like I had permission to do any of that. The word “permission” comes into play big-time in the inner minds of women. You constantly feel like you’re having to ask for it. You’re needing to have it. So really this was my mind’s survival. The book became the way for my brain and my heart to survive that which was creatively killing it. It was survival from creative death.
The challenge then becomes, how do you take those insights into your current life?
