Cooking with Florine Stettheimer

The painter and poet Florine Stettheimer should have been easy to cook from. Her poetry, commercially published for the first time in the 2010 collection Crystal Flowers, has a section devoted to “comestibles”—including airy tributes to ham, bread, and tomatoes with Russian dressing—and her paintings often portray food. She was born to a wealthy German-Jewish family in New York in the late eighteen hundreds, part of a social circle that included Neustadters and Guggenheims, and she held salons that were a Who’s Who of the New York art world. (Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, and Leo Stein were regulars.) Stettheimer did not oversee the cooking, but part of her work’s deliberate feminine aesthetic involved recording the parties, personalities, dishes, outfits, interiors, furniture, and floral arrangements that made up her life. On one canvas, Soirée, a plate of salad and pitcher of cocktails adorn a table in the foreground of a drawing-room scene, where assembled luminaries gaze at Stettheimer’s paintings-within-the-painting. These were unorthodox choices for a woman artist of her time—many others made strenuous efforts not to seem too overtly feminine.

Yet perhaps this femininity was also subversive. Today’s art world is reevaluating Stettheimer in the wake of the publication of Crystal Flowers and a 2022 biography by Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer, published by Hirmer. Bloemink situates Stettheimer as a surprisingly modern figure whose “female” topics—furniture and domestic interiors, flowers and frills, diaphanous fabrics, social events, her family, social narratives—were presented both unapologetically and with a wry, critical distance. Through the witty, effervescent tone of her poems and the originality of her painterly technique, she transformed her subjects into baubles for the artist’s gaze—and in so doing, de-gendered them. The following untitled poem is representative: “Mary Mary of the / Bronx aerie / How does your V garden / Grow? / with beans and potatoes / peas and tomatoes / and shiny bugs all in a / Row” is representative. Stettheimer’s choice of wording and image show the poem to be about making art, not salad. The “V garden” is cheekily abbreviated; its rhyming food is aesthetic and playful.

To cook from Stettheimer’s work, then, would be to acknowledge that her interest in food was not literal. In the section “Comestibles,” rhyming ditties, light as meringue, are entry points into discussions of sex and desire. Stettheimer went about this with a frankness unusual for the time period, and with a dollop of irony as well. A “comestible” is alimentary but not elementary; the fancy and fanciful word removes food from the cupboard and makes it more like art, if a bit unconventionally. In one poem, Stettheimer writes: “You stirred me / You made me giddy / Then you poured oil on my stirred self / I’m mayonnaise.” A frothy crush comes to a gluey and unsexy end in a mere four lines. Another untitled poem runs, “You beat me / I foamed.” In the next lines, its subject is “drowned” in sweetness and “parceled” out. She concludes, “You made me hot – hot – hot / I crisped into ‘kisses.’” Here, Stettheimer puts a lover’s attempts at mastering her into her oven and bakes them into female pleasure.

In order to re-create Stettheimer’s fare, I needed to transform such dishes into something visual and concrete, which seemed beyond the purview of mere food and was complicated by some of the work’s details. Despite Stettheimer’s adulthood in Manhattan, the food her poetry suggests is the stodgy fare of the old world, a reflection of how her family ate. At their homes and country homes, Bloemink wrote in her biography, they consumed elaborate several-course meals, served on fine porcelain. In the “Comestibles” section of Crystal Flowers, there are grandmotherly stuffed peppers and a family staple, the gross-sounding “chaud-froid,” a gelatin sauce made from a reduction of boiled meat. Stettheimer described it as follows: “You are hot / You are cold / Your black beauty spots / Enhance your creamy whiteness.” I considered making dramatic banquet-style versions of these dishes but have not had success in the past with making jellied meat look (or taste) edible. And there were price considerations—I needed veal and crayfish for a salad inspired by the “V garden,” and I couldn’t produce old-world banquet food at new-world prices. The Stettheimers served champagne every night in the family drawing room; I could afford only Crémant d’Alsace, a French sparkling wine produced in the traditional champagne method but in a less expensive region for growing grapes. My spirits consultant Hank Zona found me a good-quality vintage Crémant from Domaine Albert Mann that had a thematically appropriate painting on the label.

And so I turned to the artist Heidi Howard to make my Stettheimer-inspired food into something more. Howard’s style of portraiture documents social spaces, as Stettheimer did, and they are interested in depicting the passage of time in painting, as Stettheimer was. Howard explained to me that portraiture opens up “a new painted space” that creates a conversation between the painter and the sitter, and that offers a more flexible way of existing collaboratively. We decided they would paint me in my kitchen, along with the dishes I’d chosen, the cookbook I’d used, and even the Crémant d’Alsace wine. The profusion of these domestic details, down to my Christmas tree in the background, evoked Stettheimer.

Our time together passed quickly. Howard brought a sixty-inch-by-forty-six-inch prepared canvas to my kitchen. While they painted, I made two old-world dishes that were inspired by the Ballets Russes. I took “Black-Swan Effect Stuffed Peppers,” from the cookbook Summer Kitchens by Ukrainian food writer Olia Hercules, a recipe that swaps the usual meat in the filling for vegetarian-friendly apples. The “black swan” in the title is a reference to the ballet Swan Lake, where a small change (in the coloration of a swan from black to white, as with the swap from meat to apples) makes a huge difference. Second, the vegetables in Stettheimer’s untitled poem about Mary in her Bronx aerie, and the mayonnaise from the other poem quoted above, reminded me of the Russian dish salat Olivye. In its modern incarnation this is a depressing Soviet-buffet standby made with beans, tomatoes, peas, cubed potatoes, cubed ham, and plenty of mayo, but it has roots as an elegant czarist concoction with more elevated ingredients, and this was the direction I aimed for.

I took artistic license for dessert. The poem that begins “You beat me / I foamed” and ends “I crisped into ‘kisses’” implies meringue, a material that has some of the glossiness, shine, and plasticity of Stettheimer’s beloved cellophane, which she often wore and painted herself wearing. I made piped-meringue kisses, flavored with freeze-dried raspberry powder and pulverized rosemary. And since the chaud-froid’s hot-and-coldness and mysterious black spots reminded Howard of a Baked Alaska (later revealed to have been a challenge on an episode she’d recently watched of The Great British Bake Off), I made one. In place of the usual sponge-cake base, I used a layer of Russian-style walnut cake.

As I’d suspected, turning Florine Stettheimer’s airy comestibles into food-on-a-plate meant losing something of the artist’s spirit. My stuffed peppers were excellent, but humble. The rosemary-raspberry meringue “kisses” tasted delicious, but after several errors with the piping bag, I wound up with a prudishly small quantity of them, not enough to make anybody “hot – hot – hot.” My salat Olivye was banquet-worthy—I had never made one before, and was surprised at the painstaking demands of its assembly and seasoning. In the end, I forgot ingredients and ran out of time, but the recipe below has been adjusted. An attempt to make my own mayonnaise by hand was an abject failure—I should have known that all the Modernist women bought Hellmann’s.

It was the Baked Alaska that best channeled Stettheimer’s spirit—despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was a sticky, flaming, melting mess. Here was a dish, finally, that seemed to transcend mere food and generate a symbolic presence. The painter often depicted herself with huge, vaginal flower bouquets hovering near her genitals, which were simultaneously art-historical in-jokes and a transformation of the vagina’s creative power from vessels for bearing babies to sites of aesthetic production. My dessert was about the same size as the arrangements and had a similar firepower.

To make a Baked Alaska, you line a bowl with plastic wrap, fill it with layers of ice cream, insert a sponge-cake layer as a base, and put it in the freezer to set. Just prior to service, you whip up a pot of sugar and egg whites, decant the frozen Alaska, slather it with the meringue (attractively!), and then set it on fire. The fire is best produced by pouring a ninety-proof alcohol into half an eggshell nestled in the pillowy meringue atop the Alaska, quickly spooning it all over the sides, and then dropping a match into the eggshell. (You could use a kitchen torch instead, but the burnt alcohol imparts a necessary final touch of flavor.)

My Baked Alaska was a giant dome of creamy white, encrusted with sticky little points of wet, uncooked meringue. It was heavy to carry to the table. I had to use more than one match to get it going (messily dropping burnt matches into my meringue), and when it caught fire it flamed aggressively for several minutes, crisping and blackening the final product and truly creating the “beauty spots” of the poem. I thought it stood in well for one of Stettheimer’s blooming vaginal-symbolic arrangements.

When my guests and I cut into it, the following lines about “chaud-froid” applied:

You are delicious

You are a dream

You are full of softness

Full of delicacies

Marvelously blended

I gloat over your perfections

And voluptuously destroy you—

You wonderful hot-cold thing

Russian Salat Olivye, Imperial Style

You stirred me

You made me giddy

Then you poured oil on my stirred self

I’m mayonnaise

—Florine Stettheimer

Mary, Mary of the

Bronx aerie

How does your V garden

Grow

With beans and potatoes

Peas and tomatoes

And shiny bugs all in a

Row

—Florine Stettheimer

 

Adapted from The Russian Tea Room Cookbook by Faith Stewart-Gordon & Nika Hazelton.

For the salad:

1/2 cup each of the following items:

crayfish tail, cooked and cubed

veal, cooked, seasoned, and cubed

kidney beans, cooked

potatoes, cooked and cubed

green peas, cooked and cubed

tomatoes, chopped

hard-boiled eggs, cubed

For the dressing:

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1/3 cup sour cream

1 tsp Dijon mustard

2 tbsp pickles, chopped

1 tbsp capers, drained

1 tbsp minced parsley

1 tbsp minced dill

In a large bowl, combine all the elements for the salad. Combine all the elements for the dressing in a small bowl and whisk to combine. Add dressing to taste. Toss, season, and serve.

“Black Swan Effect” Stuffed Peppers

Your sharpness

Brings tears to my eyes

And only

When I have dug through

To your inner softness

I breathe freely once more

—Florine Stettheimer

Adapted from Summer Kitchens by Olia Hercules.

For the filling:

2 tbsp butter with a splash of oil

1/4 of a fennel bulb, grated

1 large carrot, grated

2/3 cup white or brown rice, cooked

2/3 cup corn kernels

1 green apple, cored and diced

1 tbsp thyme leaves

For the sauce:

2 tbsp butter with a splash of oil

1 onion, thinly sliced

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 large ripe tomatoes (or one 14.5-ounce can of diced tomatoes, pureed in the blender)

1/2 cup heavy cream

3/4 cup vegetable stock

Salt

pepper

a little sugar

To assemble:

4 large bell peppers

salt and pepper

chopped parsley and dill to serve

To make the filling, heat the butter and oil in a large frying pan over medium-low heat. Add the fennel and carrot and cook until soft, then stir in the rice, corn, apple, and thyme. Season generously with salt and pepper. The filling should be very well seasoned, almost on the verge of being over-seasoned, as it will also serve as seasoning for the peppers.

To make the sauce, heat the butter and oil in a medium frying pan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook for five minutes, stirring frequently, until it begins to soften. Add the garlic, turn down the heat to low, and cook gently for three more minutes, to mellow the flavor. Grate in the tomatoes, discarding the skins, or add the pureed tomatoes, and cook for fifteen minutes, stirring from time to time. Add the cream and the stock and stir. Season with salt, pepper, and a little sugar if it needs it. The sauce should be silky and luscious.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Cut the peppers in half, seed them, and stuff with the filling. Pour half the sauce into a baking dish that will snugly hold all the peppers. Arrange the peppers in the dish and pour the rest of the sauce on top of them. Cover the dish tightly with a lid or foil and cook in the oven for thirty minutes. Take off the lid or foil and cook for another ten minutes or until cooked through and golden. Do not overcook. Serve topped with parsley and dill.

Rosemary-Raspberry Meringue Kisses

You beat me

I foamed

Your sweetest sweet you almost drowned me in

You parceled out my whole self

You thrust me into darkness

You made me hot – hot – hot

I crisped into “kisses”

—Florine Stettheimer

 

4 large egg whites, at room temperature

1/2 tsp cream of tartar

1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp superfine sugar

1/4 cup powdered sugar

1/4 cup freeze-dried raspberries, bashed into powder

1 tsp rosemary, very finely chopped

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a tray with parchment paper and assemble a piping bag fitted with a large cake tip (I used one with a fifteen-mm round opening).

In a mixing bowl, beat the whites until frothy. Add the cream of tartar and beat at medium speed while gradually adding two tablespoons of the superfine sugar. When soft peaks form, add another tablespoon of superfine sugar and increase the speed to high. When stiff peaks form, gradually add the remaining superfine sugar and beat until stiff and very glossy. Gently fold in the powdered sugar, raspberry powder, and rosemary.

Fill the piping bag with the mixture and pipe into “kisses.” Bake for one hour, then turn off the and leave inside to cool for one hour more.

Walnut, Orange, and Pistachio Baked Alaska

You are hot

You are cold

Your black beauty spots

Enhance your creamy whiteness

You are delicious

You are a dream

You are full of softness

Full of delicacies

Marvelously blended

I gloat over your perfections

And voluptuously destroy you—

You wonderful hot-cold thing

—Florine Stettheimer

 

For this recipe you will need an old-fashioned, five-pint metal dessert mold or other deep bowl with a nine-inch round opening.

For the cake layer:

4 large eggs, separated, at room temperature

a pinch of salt

1/8 tsp almond extract

1/2 cup superfine sugar, divided

1/3 cup flour, sifted with 3/4 tsp baking powder

1/2 cup walnuts, toasted and finely chopped

For the meringue:

4 large egg whites, at room temperature

1/2 tsp cream of tartar

1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp superfine sugar

1/2 cup powdered sugar

To assemble:

1 pint orange sherbet, softened

1 pint pistachio ice cream, softened

1 pint vanilla ice cream, softened and mixed with 1/3 cup orange marmalade

2 tbsp rum, vodka, or other alcohol, 90 proof or above

1/2 of an eggshell

To make the cake layer:

For best results, make the cake layer the day before you intend to assemble the Baked Alaska. Set a baking rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a nine-inch springform pan with wax paper covering the bottom and coming slightly up the sides, and grease the paper.

In a large bowl using a wooden spoon, stir the egg yolks vigorously with a pinch of salt for thirty seconds. Add the almond extract, stir, and reserve. With an electric beater, whip the egg whites at high speed until soft peaks form, add three tablespoons of the sugar and continue to whip at high speed for two minutes. Add two tablespoons more of sugar, whip until stiff peaks form, add the remaining sugar and beat three minutes longer.

Fold the whipped egg whites, flour, and walnuts into the egg yolks as gently as possible, working quickly but in small batches. This process should take about two minutes altogether.  Fill the pan, distributing the batter evenly, and bake for twenty to twenty-four minutes, until the cake turns pale beige and tests done with a skewer. Remove from the oven and let cool.

To make the meringue:

In a mixing bowl, beat the whites until frothy. Add the cream of tartar and beat at medium speed while gradually adding two tablespoons of the superfine sugar. When soft peaks form, add another tablespoon of superfine sugar and increase the speed to high. When stiff peaks form, gradually add the remaining superfine sugar and beat until stiff and very glossy. Gently fold in the powdered sugar.

To assemble:

Line a nine-inch bowl or dessert mold with plastic wrap. Fill with ice cream in three even layers, leaving an inch or two at the top for the sponge cake. Insert the sponge cake and return to the freezer.  When it is time to serve, invert the frozen Alaska over your serving plate and remove the saran wrap. Using a rubber spatula, cover with meringue. Nestle the eggshell on top of the dessert and fill with alcohol. Tableside, just prior to service, quickly spoon the alcohol over the sides of the dessert and drop a match into the eggshell. When the flames have subsided, remove the eggshell, slice, and serve.

 

Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. Read earlier installments of Eat Your Words.

Three Is a More Interesting Number than Two: A Conversation with Maggie Millner

It’s easy to feel happy for a friend who has suddenly, and seemingly irrevocably, fallen in love. It’s just as easy to wonder, privately, if they might, one day, fall out of it. Love stories, like rhymes, are initially generative. Both begin with the promise of infinite possibility: the couple—and the couplet—could go anywhere! But anywhere always winds up being somewhere, and that somewhere is very often a dead end. 

Couplets, Maggie Millner’s rhapsodic debut, is officially described as a novel in verse, but the poems that comprise it buck constantly against their generic container. Some are in prose, others are in rhyme and meter, and all are spoken by a young woman straddling two relationships and a shifting sense of self. Affair narratives are all about reversed chronologies: they end where love begins. But when the speaker leaves her long-term boyfriend for a first-time girlfriend, her timelines get all mixed up: she becomes a “conduit / between them: a conversation they conducted / with my mouth.” 

Couplets is preoccupied by triangulations. The speaker is intensely jealous of her new girlfriend’s other girlfriend, a novelist who every other weekend also has a “tryst” with a married hedge fund manager and his lover, who is a novelist, too. When he ejaculates into one of the novelists, the other pretends that she is a voyeur, peering in on her competitor, the hedge fund manager’s wife. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a poet, finds that her own love triangle produces shifting meaning. She and her lovers are bound together, but she can’t seem to harness them. “Our own story made no sense / to me and twisted up whenever I tried / writing it.” 

At the end of January, Maggie and I spoke over Zoom about the language that attends love and the desires that animate the life of any writer, who will always find herself, no matter the genre, struggling between the impulse to act and the compulsion to self-analyze.

 

INTERVIEWER

Was there a moment when it suddenly became clear to you that you were writing a book, as opposed to a series of poems?

 MILLNER

I hadnt imagined writing a single, book-length narrative poem. When we learn to write poems, we usually learn to write these very small, discrete lyric objects, and so I had always imagined that my first book would be a collection of things that I had foraged from various years of my life. But because I had two year-long fellowships, the ostensible goal of which were to write a book, I was able to be more ambitious. The momentum of this particular poetic form took hold, and I followed it until I had the bulk of a manuscript. Then I realized the prose sections also belonged in it—that the verse needed to be aerated. 

 INTERVIEWER

What was missing in the couplet form that the prose was able to provide?

 MILLNER

There’s a relentlessness to writing in rhyming couples that for the reader can be exhausting and claustrophobic. I was concerned about the lack of formal surprise. But also, life has formal qualities, and a relationship model is a formal question. The book was also very much about putting things in dialectical relation to each other, so I realized that there needed to be some other secondary mode or interlocutor. 

INTERVIEWER

The title of the book, Couplets, is a pun, but I also felt it to be a kind of joke, because the couples keep being interrupted by the intrusion of third parties: the speaker’s girlfriend’s girlfriend and the speaker’s ex. I wonder if you find this third necessary in matters of love—if the two depend on it. 

MILLNER

Three is a more interesting number than two. There’s a romance to the love triangle. There’s an inherent asymmetry, a more volatile set of relationships. Our desires are most manifest when we’re being pulled in two directions, when there are disparate, orthogonal, or even oppositional forces inside us. Those are the moments when complex self-knowledge happens. The times when you have to prioritize multiple, competing selves lead to personal transformation, I think. 

I was thinking of Aristophanes’ idea about the source of romantic love: that people were originally conjoined and then split in half, so we’re doomed to wander the earth until we find our missing counterpart, at which point we become complete. His myth actually makes a provision for gay couples, but it unfolds only within a strictly binary gender system, and only within the premise that there’s a single lasting partner for each of us. If you depart from the idea that the couple is the default, preordained arrangement, suddenly the constructed dimensions of relational structures start to open up. The book’s jacket copy says something about coming out: one woman’s coming-out, coming undone. But I do think those two things are discrete. The consummation of queer desire is a realization that anticipates a later realization, which is that relationships are not inherently meant to be durable.

INTERVIEWER

In Couplets, the only mention of coming out is immediately related to climaxing. Was it important to you to describe this supposedly outward and public-facing process as something very intimate?

 MILLNER

The speaker is in part resistant to that climactic, self-actualizing narrative because she is also very reluctant to renounce her previous relationship. If we code her as stepping into some presupposed fate, it turns her previous life into a pretext for this other, truer moment. The cultural incentives to read things that way are both very appealing and very abundant. But the reality is that she still feels real love for her ex, which doesn’t neatly coexist with the role that she is stepping into; the relationship with her ex has an integrity that this book wants to honor. I don’t feel that time is teleological and progressive: that we’re always heading somewhere, but we’re not there yet. I believe that everyone has many lives.  

 INTERVIEWER

Much of the story of these two couples takes place in a rapidly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the highly specific proper nouns that anchor your speaker to a sense of place and social milieu aren’t easy to square in verse. Eckhaus Latta, Saraghina: I find them to be rather ugly words. Why did you include them?

 MILLNER

Through this new relationship, the speaker is stepping into an identity, but she’s also stepping into a social class and milieu that is not entirely comfortable to her, where queerness is the opposite of marginal, and where being a person in an alternative relationship model is actually quite common. She is hyper-attentive to the signifiers that attend this world, which she too finds ugly (and alluring). On the one hand, she longs to be naturalized into it, but on the other, there is also this inevitable friction between the person she knows herself to be within the social contexts that she has occupied, and the world that these proper nouns stand in for. Part of why this isn’t a more triumphant coming out story has to do with the fact that queer life, within the circles she’s in, doesn’t attract public shame. On the contrary, there’s social cachet in stepping into that identity. Which is not to elide the homophobia and queerphobia that continue to dominate most spaces in this country, or the elders and activists who have made communities like this one possible. But for the speaker, there’s something disingenuous about claiming her queerness only as a socially marginal identity.

INTERVIEWER

Toward the very end of the book, the narrator declares that in verse, as opposed to in prose, there are “barely any characters at all.” What do you think about the differences between character as it can be constructed in prose versus poetry?

 MILLNER

As contemporary readers of poetry, we often assume that the lyric “I” is the writing self, which does seem to preclude characterization, because that “I” is seen as pointing to a nonfictional human figure. But we’re wrong when we make the assumption that the “I” and the self are coextensive, even in poems that seem totally autobiographical. I want to be taken seriously as a maker of artifice, and I’m interested in inviting my readers away from that assumption, while also maintaining a sense of intimate disclosure, which we typically associate with the lyric poem. 

 INTERVIEWER

The book is classified as “a novel in verse,” and your speaker is, for a period, intensely jealous of her girlfriend’s girlfriend, who is a novelist. Although she never says so outright, you get the sense that she fears the story this novelist will make of her love for the speaker’s girlfriend will be more compelling than the story the speaker can make in verse. Which makes me wonder, how do you feel about novels and novelists?

 MILLNER

There might be more references to novelists in the book than to poets, which is reflective of the speaker’s taste and of a desire to be maximally immersed in experiences of every aesthetic kind. Novels provide that exhaustive immersion. It’s not that poems don’t, but poetry is more condensed and demanding and doesn’t act on attention the way that novelistic prose acts on attention. There’s a passivity and submissiveness that the reader of a novel gets to enjoy. The reader of poetry is invited to focus on granular particulate dimensions language—it’s a less submissive experience, or at least a less passive one.

As a poet, I have an inner conflict around the desire to write a novel while being a poet. I feel pulled in two different directions: I have a strong affinity for narrative, characterization, and durational storytelling, but it’s very hard for me to imagine turning off the poetic apparatus. The speaker is entertaining the possibility of being otherwise, of existing in a slightly different shape. She wonders if her life might be radically different if she could find a form that better reflects what’s going on with her.

INTERVIEWER

The couple form is said to be infinitely transformative, and yet many experience it as a restriction. The same can be said of rhyme and meter. On the one hand, it produces infinite meaning; on the other, it can feel laden with rules. How do you feel about living and working within these two forms? 

MILLNER

A foundational belief that undergirds this book is that one way to feel free, to experience agency within the repressive systems that govern our lives, is to historicize and try to understand the material conditions through which they came to be. The idea that to write in free verse is an exercise in unmediated personal expression presupposes so many things about what that form does. The shift away from rhyme and meter is extremely recent relative to literary history; the phrase “free verse” is only a century and a half old. It’s also somewhat oxymoronic; to me, as soon as anything becomes compulsory—as soon as it’s presented as the only available option—it doesn’t make much sense to attach the adjective free to it. Contemporary poets are generally expected, with the consensus of the commercial and academic institutions, to write in ways that sound more like speech than like oldfangled verse forms. So the idea that writing in an inherited form is a deviation from the default is, ironically, a basically presentist idea. Still, if radical forms are those that stage a departure from the status quo, we live in a time when using rhyme and meter can actually qualify. I would argue that they can even take on a new political charge when used by people historically excluded from the institutions that propagated them.

I feel similarly vexed about relationship structures. I do feel there is something amazing and irreplicable about the experience of being in a couple. And I don’t think that experience is only a cultural production—there’s something genuinely special that can happen between two individuals. Moments of intimacy with one other person have been the most transformative, spiritual moments of my life. The speaker of Couplets is magnetized toward those experiences. They’re real, they’re important, and they’re beautiful—they’re what it’s all about. But through those experiences, she finds herself unwittingly signed up for a certain kind of partnership—caught in a default she didn’t necessarily choose.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel as if the couplet is a flawed form that we have to reinvent, to the extent that reinvention is possible? Or do you believe that the couple is an ideal form that is tarnished by lived reality? 

MILLNER

I think the issue is not with the structure of the couple, but with the telos of any relationship being eternity—the idea that the couple is a form you only step into and never out of. There is something exalted about the experience that two individuals can have with each other. Suddenly, you’re not really an individual, which is the profundity that you experience in the presence of an other. I feel very attached to that. But this book is an experiment in thinking through the question, What if staying together wasn’t the tacit objective of every relationship? In Poetic Closure, Barbara Herrnstein Smith writes that the couplet is a unit that enacts closure. Every two lines, there’s resolution. And so there’s a propulsive momentum to the form, but it also pretends to arrive at closure over, and over, and over again. There’s an assumption that the couple is a closed container, but the couplet unravels that assumption through repetition.

INTERVIEWER

I was struck by how resistant your speaker is to the endings that might otherwise be imposed upon her; she leaves her boyfriend but feels herself conducting his mannerisms in her relationship with her girlfriend, so that the two meet in her. Why were you drawn to that choreography, which seems impossible for a book about couples, written in couplets?

MILLNER

On the one hand, we are all familiar with the story of falling in love—we all know how it can go. And at the same time, we don’t, as a culture, have many urtexts about voluntary breakups, because divorce only stopped being taboo, like, yesterday. The idea that a marriage is composed of two subjects who are equally entitled to an experience of self-actualization is not very old—even younger than free verse! If we look at our great foundational texts, especially within the Western canon, relationships end nonconsensually, either by death or by some other nonmutual event. 

There’s a reason that literature is still being written about the fundamental question of how to know when a relationship is over, even if you still have an attachment to that person. We don’t have cultural scripts for those questions, and the way they are legislated is still retrograde and dependent on conservative notions of the sanctity of the nuclear family. The speaker of my book is very much reckoning with the residues of historical expectations of what women owe men. There’s a great temptation on the part of women in hetero partnerships to feel an outsized sense of responsibility for their demise. 

 

Maya Binyam is a contributing editor of the Review.