Jessica Fisher is the winner of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, a gift of the Drue Heinz Trust/American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Holloway Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Berkeley.
What part of the United States did you come from?
For the past twelve years, I have lived in the Bay Area, though I’ll be moving to Western Massachusetts when I return to the States. I grew up in Southern California, Virginia, and Mississippi, and went to college in Pennsylvania. As a kid, I also spent a lot of time abroad, primarily in France and Germany, and have really missed the experience of living in a foreign country, so being in Italy this year has been wonderful in that way.
Describe a particularly inspiring moment or location you've experienced in Rome thus far.
I love going to see the amazing Pietro Cavallini frescoes at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. Rome obviously has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to art, but spend a day jockeying for position in the Vatican Museums, for example, and seeing comes to seem like a contact sport. Part of the immense pleasure of visiting the frescoes, then, stems from the solitude in which one encounters them. They exist still due to an accident of history: painted in 1292, they survived the church’s 18th century renovation only in the area of the church that was converted into a choir for the cloistered nuns; they were hidden behind paneling until their rediscovery in 1900. To see them, you have to ring a bell to the left of the church; one of the nuns then takes you up in a rickety elevator to the choir loft. It’s remarkably moving to come eye to eye with these sensitively-rendered figures, which were never meant to be seen intimately—in some sense the story of their almost complete destruction is also what makes them visible in a new way.
To what extent, if any, has your proposed project changed since your arrival?
My poetry is always influenced by the vagaries of experience and by serendipitous encounters, and this year—living in a new city, in a new language, and with dozens of new people—has been full of unexpected stimuli. I am still working on the project I initially proposed, but I also find myself writing many unplanned pieces, often sparked by specific things I have seen or heard in Rome.
Have you had any "eureka!" moments or unanticipated breakthroughs in the course of your work here?
Many. But the most recent breakthrough is also the most important to me. As a very young child, I dreamt that I could fly. It was a dream in which intense concentration allowed for me to become weightless, fast. It was my favorite dream, and I was so sad to lose it as I grew older. Just last night it returned to me for the first time in thirty years: I dreamt that I was running through the Academy garden, and began to fly past the olive and pine trees, over the flowers that weave themselves through the grass. Giovanni was coming up the driveway and as he approached I was lowered to the ground, so that it looked like I had fallen while running. I don’t whether the return of my long-lost superpower has to do with being in Rome, or if I will be able to retain it, but there is both an intensity and a calm that I associate with being here, and which feels ungrounded, airborne, in important ways.
What aspect of your project are you most looking forward to?
The least expected. I have noticed this year that often the most exciting poems come when I am working diligently on something else—and these surprise pieces come with the speed and ease that makes writing really fun. I also look forward to seeing how the writers I’ve read together with other residents and fellow this year—of Ovid and Dante, in particular—will influence the work still to come.
What part of your project has been or do you anticipate will be the most challenging?
Rome is such a stimulating city that I feel still, after seven months here, that my eyes are fuller than my mind. It can be hard to know how to write out of this experience, though I think my work will ultimately be well served by it.
What's surprised you most about living in Rome?
I hadn’t realized how compact and walkable the city center really is, or how layered. The first week we were here, my husband and I researched a number of possible outings, wanting to get a handle on the history of each place before going to see it so that we could in turn help the kids understand what they were seeing. Attempting such mastery was itself a fool’s errand. We finally decided that we would just pick one thing that was on our bucket list, and headed down the stairs toward the Pantheon. Along the way we encountered one site after another that I had thought we would save for another day, as well as many places that weren’t yet on our radar. That’s when I first got the sense that Rome would have to be seen recursively, and that the understanding of this place would come piecemeal.
How have you managed the balance between your work (time in the studio/study) and engagement with Rome and Italy (travel, sightseeing, interactions with locals)?
Because I am here with my husband and two children, now 7 and 3, there’s really no hope at balance—but work and play and illness and travel seem to go in cycles. It’s been such an incredible pleasure to see Rome not only through my eyes, but also through those of my partner, an architect, who draws his way through the city, and through the eyes of my two kids, one of whom loves myth and the other who loves motorcycles!
How do you anticipate your Rome Prize Fellowship will influence future work?
When I think of what this year at the American Academy in Rome will mean for my work in the decades to come, I keep returning to the line that ends Wallace Stevens’ “Auroras of Autumn”: I imagine the memory of Rome will be “Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick.” In a general way, I know that depth and warmth and beauty of this astounding city, and the friendships with artists and scholars facilitated by being here at the AAR, will stay with me a long time. My sense of history has deepened immensely through the months here, shifting how I think of life, death, and the process of making. I have also started several projects here that are specific to Rome, but which I won’t finish here; I look forward to finishing them in some far away place, and in returning to Rome for new inspiration in the coming years.
What is your favorite spot at the Academy? or in Rome?
Just as one doesn’t have a favorite child, there’s no playing favorites with a place you love, and both Rome and the Academy are breathtaking. For me, the real gift of having a year in Rome is the possibility of re-encountering the things I love best—the Pantheon, especially in a rainstorm; the Caravaggio paintings in San Luigi dei Francesi, Sant’Agostino, and Santa Maria del Popolo; the silent tortured figure of the Laocoön; Ostia Antica; the stand of umbrella pines at Pamphili park; the view from the Gianicolo; the Academy garden in spring—