Jessica Hincapie is a poet living in Austin, TX. You can find her work online and in print in various locations including the Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Meridian, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere.
Jessica’s poem “Catch a Tiger” appears in the Winter 2020 issue of Carve. Order your copy here.
Catch a Tiger deals with danger, intrigue, risk, and sensual reward, what was your process in tying all these themes together?
I think a poem’s images often shapes its themes and that’s kind of what happened here. This poem ended up taking a lot of imagery from the Everglades and swamps of South Florida, where I grew up near as a girl.
That environment so well reflected what it felt like to be an adolescent who was at once so enamored with life and its strange beauties and at the same time, was deathly afraid of what being alive entailed. There’s such a fine line between fear and fascination and I also think a lot of being female means navigating that same psychological terrain of wanting to be brash and full of life but being told by others you should be wary and restrained.
It felt natural that these themes would coalesce in the poem because so much of the poem is about trusting instinct and intuition, and overcoming conditioned fear. Regardless of gender, getting older is often about taking ownership of one’s own life, especially when it comes to the parts that may lead to pleasure, pain, fear, joy, etc. because these are the things that also promote growth and self-discovery.
You positioned one of the most poignant lines in the middle of the piece: "For a woman, the most dangerous time is when she finally does [ understand what she is]". Did this line's positioning in the poem change overtime, or was the placement purposeful?
Funny that you should ask that because my poems very rarely come fully formed. They’re more pieced together by an abundance of fragments and ideas I continuously collect. I try to take in as much lyric and imagery as I can and then sort through it to find commonalities in narrative and theme. This poem wasn’t like that though.
The line you’re asking about was not initially included and was written a few weeks later. I kept thinking that the poem was not yet done, and needed a moment that stepped away from any narrative. I was trying to say about how as young girls we’re often taught to make ourselves smaller while boys are taught to be assertive.
I knew immediately the placement of the line would be directly in the middle because I’m often wary of throwing out declarations in a poem without grounding the reader first in specificity. I think without the initial images, that line could mean many different things, and the word dangerous might be taken literally instead of the reader understanding the dual meaning behind the phrase. That dangerous in this poem might also mean liberated or awakened. I think this line also speaks to the end, in which the speaker admits to having always known what she wanted, but never feeling confident enough to claim it. Women who know what they want and who they are have always been deemed a bit dangerous.
You bring in a variety of sensory details, that intensify the emotional investment. What role did you want food to play in this piece, and how do you think it strengthened the work?
I think food is so important in terms of emotion, as it can be a form of comfort, of political or artistic expression, even sensual at times. It probably comes up more times in my work than even I notice.
That image is also a very domestic one and so it seemed fitting that the “he” of the poem would be resigned to the kitchen. I also think that the image of “smell of fat, and him pinching salt into a pot” echoes the previous image of the boys tying the python to the truck. The latter is overly aggressive and the former extremely domestic and simple, yet there exists a strange danger and sensuality in both. And the speaker is witness to both, and both instances affect her deeply. But while the speaker is mostly an observer in the poem, this does not take away her agency. She is still very much in control of how she lets what she observes move her to action and thought.
What did you hope the reader grasped from this poem and do you have other work coming that deals with similar themes?
Well more than anything I hope the reader had an experience reading the poem. Positive or negative, all I want from my work is to elicit a thought or a feeling. From there it would be great if the reader somehow felt seen. Maybe they too had a hard time moving away from the periphery of life, even if their secret wish was to dive right in to the deepest parts.
In all honesty though I think poetry’s magic comes from the fact that it asks more questions than it can answer so if readers leave the poem with new questions about themselves or their surroundings then to me that is a measurement of success.
The collection of poems I am working on now definitely feels enmeshed in the physical, especially the swampy, sandy, strange places and people of my youth, much like this poem. I also love Southern Gothic writing and how it’s very representative of the idea that truth is often stranger than fiction. Its true that some of the wildest images in my poems are the ones I or loved ones have been in direct witness to and I think a majority of my poems are interested in breaking down the lines between the lived and the imagined, the possible and impossible.