"Of Haunting Faces, Awaiting Justice: An Interview with Lory Bedikian" by Ahdenae Khodaverdian

Across the street from Woodbury’s campus stands St. Leon Armenian Cathedral, a mammoth built of slabs of travertine imported from Armenia. The church’s goal in its architecture was to welcome members of the diaspora by showing an inclination to adjust to the new while still maintaining its traditional forms. Its base is made from traditional materials and methods, and its ceilings are lined with stained glass that is atypical of the cathedrals back in Armenia. The cathedral is something I find as beautiful as it is unsettling. It’s a monolith of my culture, a place I visit every year, like clockwork, on January 6th and on Easter Sunday; a place I thought—during the first six years of my life—was meant only for candle lighting, pastel Easter dresses, and breaking those onion-skin-wrapped eggs that leave behind the pale imprints of cilantro leaves. Yet, now, I find myself merely nodding politely at the old ladies dressed in their Sunday best. I know they know I don’t sit in these pews every Sunday—or any Sunday at all—and the resulting curl of guilt is something I can come to terms with only after I’ve unfurled it with my pen across a page.

“The word ‘Armenian’ itself carries so much weight. It’s full of stone, dust, haunting faces, and shrill music—sometimes laughter. I can’t name it. I’m stuck just at the mention of the word itself. Let me answer by explaining that what I write is immensely informed by the fact that I’m the daughter of immigrants,” mentioned award-winning poet Lory Bedikian when I brought up the subject of our shared culture. The isolation and ambiguity that first- and second-generation Armenian-Americans feel from their culture is not a taboo topic. It is that isolation that allows me to not think about my roots at all for weeks at a time, and then, at other times, to write a full introductory paragraph needling out the meaning behind the architectural decisions of an Armenian cathedral. These are the cards we were handed in life—so now what? What do we do moving forward with this hodge-podge of feelings?

Bedikian tells me that what she did with this amalgamation was turn to poetry. I asked her what originally drew her to poetry, to which she responded,

I don’t think I was necessarily drawn to it. I think what may have happened is that something was always internally there while I heard poems, music, hymns, songs and prayers during my childhood. If it wasn’t a poem from Vahan Tekeyan read aloud by my father, it may have been Peter, Paul and Mary on the turntable or my grandmother singing an Armenian sharagan.

There are certain moments that make me smile when sharing experiences—my own mother was very fond of reading Ruben Sevak to me as a child. But Bedikian continues,

[p]oetry was the sister I never had, the one who understood how I wanted to take my own sounds and form a protest, an outcry or create outlandish gibberish. Others around me may have been reciting verse to uphold tradition or may have sang songs to celebrate a holiday or whatnot, but I believe something in me knew that certain rhythms of language, certain turns of speech, cleverness of the tongue, the bitterness of a phrase, was sudden magic. Once I was old enough to learn how to write it down, or once I learned in school that poetry was possible, that’s when I may have been drawn to it. Around the age of eight, I think it became something I knew about myself, consciously or subconsciously.

And so began a productive career for Bedikian, writing keen poems with the intent of healing.

She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, winning the Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award for Poetry. Her book, The Book of Lamenting, was awarded the 2010 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and she has been selected several times as a finalist in Crab Orchard Series poetry competitions, in addition to receiving grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial fund and AFFMA. Additional award recognitions have come from Poets & Writers, which chose her work as a finalist for the 2010 California Writers Exchange Award. Her work was included in the 2015 anthology, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, released by Beyond Baroque Books, and chosen as a finalist in the 2015 AROHO Orlando Competition. Her newer work has been published in Miramar Magazine, featured on the Best American Poetry blog as part of the "Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body" series, included in the Fall 2018 issue of Tin House, and appeared in a recent issue of The Los Angeles Review.

Woodbury is full of prospective professional writers, and the issue of writing for an audience is always one that stumps us students when it comes to poetry, since most of us began writing poetry as personal reflections. Curious, I asked Bedikian if she writes with a target audience in mind, to which she replied,

Rarely. I write for myself. Unless, of course, I’m in some fit of rage. In that case, I’ll address the person or thing that I believe is ruining the plight of mankind and destroying the earth, and I’ll write in a fury. Those poems never last.

Hah! Well, that’s somewhat of a relief. That kind of creative writing just sounds emotionally exhausting. She continues,

I’ll never forget one of the most important lessons I learned, which was from [the poet] Eavan Boland. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but the idea is that when you write from a platform or podium or with an agenda, your poems most likely will fail. (But what is a failed poem, right? That would be a great discussion!) If you’re a feminist, a vegetarian, a tree-hugger, a rocker—if you say you’re determined to write a poem from that vantage point—most likely it will be forced and contrived and perhaps even a bit boring or bordering on cliché. I mean, there’s enough artificiality around us. We go to poetry to save us from it, don’t we? I must add, though, that although some poets may not think this way—and that’s absolutely fine—I do believe a poet can be a vessel for creating moments of voice for the voiceless, can be instruments for bringing certain injustices to light. However, this is a complicated part of writing. One must keep a balance of purpose and craft, while meditating on what needs to be said and why. We need to really reflect upon ourselves and then create, sure, out of necessity, but with the idea that this poem, through language and invention, will heal [us] first and then our “audience.”

When writing with no true audience in mind (unless in the aforementioned fit of rage, of course), inspiration seems like it might be derived from such a litany of sources. I personally derive mine from my experiences and from my lifelong fascination with magic, and I find listening to others’ inspirations is my favorite part about working with creatives because they can truly come from anywhere.

When I asked Bedikian about the sources of inspiration for her poetry, she replied,

Injustice. I hate to say it. I envy poets who find inspiration in observing the beauty of nature or peaceful, comic situations, but for the most part I would have to say the primary reasons I write come from moments of either witnessing, feeling, observing, or hearing about situations that just aren’t making any sense whatsoever. When the “other” poems come—whether they’re inspired by Yusef Lateef or Lester Young—if they don’t touch upon some level of injustice, I always assume that I’ve been lazy and haven’t gone far enough in my thinking or feeling. Perhaps there’s a mistake in that way of writing, but I’m not sure. I’m still learning . . . .

And Lory also shares that her process of writing poetry is indeed ever-changing: “Well, it’s never the same. And I must explain that at this point in my life, being the mother of twin six-year-old boys, the process of writing the poem sometimes resembles trying to lay cement down with a toothpick. Terrible analogy, I know.” Actually, given my own mother’s descriptions of motherhood, I think it’s a pretty accurate analogy. Bedikian elaborates on the subject of motherhood:

That’s the other thing, motherhood sort of blankets your brilliance so you are constantly giving yourself pep talks, such as the following: You used to be kind of a genius. What happened. Take a deep breath. Think of how Lucille Clifton flourished, despite everything. Think of the women who passed from this earth with their notebooks never found. Damn it. Just write. I thought I’d share that small internal monologue in case it can be of service to anyone else. I mean, if it’s not six years of no sleep, it may be working two jobs, a bad relationship, worrying about the world, anything. There’s always a reason to betray the process. But you must get back to it. So, when I can, I’ll write a sentence or phrase down. At times, a title for a poem or manuscript will come to mind. There are magical instances, where late at night or in my car, I’ll write a page or two. Once I’ve got the first draft, then it’s time to decide if there is anything even worth revising. If not, then I know I need to write further. In order to write further, I turn to my predecessors and/or contemporaries. I may read something completely unrelated to poetry before writing more down. So, the process is malleable—sometimes fluid, sometimes rigid—but for the most part, a lot of writing has to happen before revising and before the final edits. Also . . . the process does have to take me to a point where I actually want to hear the poem over-and-over . . . If not, I put it aside and move on.

Every time I hear writers speak of the writing process, I am struck by just how similar writing is to creating any other form of artwork. I vividly remember my professor in figure drawing giving me similar advice when I was first studying to become an illustrator. He told me to erase the one line I had been noodling for the better part of an hour. It was a line in the model’s arm that I thought almost captured the gesture correctly, but just would not provoke exactly what I wanted it to. He told me to erase it all, the whole arm, and, to my protest, said, “You are the artist who drew that originally. If you really liked the line, you have the capability to draw it again. But you will likely end up with something even better if you start over.” It was a powerful message, paralleling Bedikian’s: sometimes just throw it away and move forward.

To conclude our interview together, I felt it necessary to broach an important subject: we’re both Armenians. Being an Armenian carries a lot of weight. It’s a point of pride and deep sadness and loud parties and everything feeling contrary, at least to me. As an Armenian, born in America to immigrant parents, I find myself grappling with my culture all the time, so I decided to take the opportunity to explore this topic with someone from a similar background. I asked Bedikian for her insight as to how the culture informs her work and to what extent she sees her work as a lens into Armenian life and politics, to which she replied:

My father was from Lebanon, my mother from Syria. They arrived to this country in 1962, first living in Watertown, Massachusetts, then moving to Hartford, Connecticut, to West New York, New Jersey, to Maryland, and this was just the beginnings of course. I was born in San Francisco, lived in Van Nuys, and was raised in Cupertino, back when it was mostly apricot orchards. . .

At the mention of this fruit, there’s a nagging voice in my head that sounds distantly like that of my grandparents, who would find it necessary to point out that apricots are originally from Armenia, and another that sounds like my relatives still in Yerevan, who would say that the Armenian sun creates the sweetest ones. But I let Bedikian continue.

. . . eventually ending up in the L.A. area. So, I’ve always been writing from that in-between space. The culture they carried with them over the Atlantic has infiltrated into my genetics, into my epigenetics. We all know the history of Armenia, and so we are small pieces of that original map moving around the world, specks in the universe. The culture they brought [with them] and tried so desperately to preserve is an element that I try to salvage or reject as I write. What ends up in the writing is a psychological issue as well as an aesthetic one. I don’t necessarily see my work as a lens into Armenian life and politics, but perhaps a reaction to all of it. For example, I took a trip to Armenia in 1997 with my parents, which formed many of my poems in my first collection. During that trip I met one of my aunts who had endured abuse in her marriage, and hearing this affected me greatly and is slightly referenced in one of my poems, but nothing to a courageous extent. If I’m not mistaken, I believe Armenia is one of the few countries where domestic violence is not illegal. Poetry sometimes works as a bullhorn, an alarm. Another way to say it is that my work speaks from a place where the speaker’s story—what needs to be said—is a piecing-together of parental and familial histories that either wanted to be told or, out of fear, were hidden.

All of this is echoed in Bedikian’s work, including in the following excerpt from her poem, “Broccoli,” which we will be publishing in Issue Four of MORIA in early December:

                     . . . oh mother, I can’t save you.
Even momentarily, I can’t send you back

to the humid rooftops of Aleppo, where
the stories have no middle or ending, just

the preface of that’s what we did, that’s
where we slept when the nights sweltered.

You’ve kept your stories from me and that’s
all I wanted. Now I have to tell my own.

Bedikian’s poetry, to me, has always read as frank. There isn’t extensive masking of issues, whether they be related to culture or politics or not. Bedikian mentions, “Depending on who’s defining me, I can be an Armenian poet, an American poet of Armenian descent, an Armenian-American poet . . . the list goes on. I try not to let the labels dictate what I should be writing about, but my writing is informed by all of it.”

Ahdenae Khodaverdian

Ahdenae “Ado” Khodaverdian is a business major with two minors in animation and professional writing, so it’s easy to picture how her interests feel fissured but cohesive in a strange way. She has been writing fiction and narratives since the third grade but has upgraded from a flimsy spiral-bound notebook to her laptop most days. She loves when people are excited about what they are doing, and the hollow quiet of weekends on campus. She wants to one day become a visual development artist for cartoons.