Poetic Asides with Robert Lee Brewer - Poet Interviews

2009 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 10

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:24:45 GMT

Over the weekend, I purchased a copy of The Best American Poetry 2009, edited by David Lehman and David Wagoner. This has turned into an annual tradition, because the anthology brings together 75 poems (usually by 75 poets) by new-to-me poets and some familiar favorites. The 2009 edition actually includes two poets who've been interviewed on Poetic Asides: Denise Duhamel for "How It Will End" and Martha Silano for "Love." (Click here to read the Duhamel interview; click here to read the Silano interview.)

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Today is Tuesday, so it's a Two for Tuesday prompt! Here are your two options:

Write a love poem.
Write an anti-love poem.

Here's my attempt for the day:

"Front porch, windows for kitchen"

Something as simple as leaving the couch
to answer the phone. He feels his vision
closing, his body tightening. He sits
down in a pool of darkness, a shallow
dream. Everywhere, voices are searching.

Leaving the company of people is
disconcerting. She discerns a nothing
in his eyes, so she looks into them and
talks. She breathes her life into his mouth and
knows this is the moment she always feared.

What would happen if they found their dream house,
but it was engulfed in flames? Would they try
to put it out? Would they ring all the bells
in town for help? Or would they hold their hands
together tight and watch the damn thing burn?

Interview With Poet (and 2008 November PAD Chapbook Challenge champion) Shann Palmer

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:38:55 GMT

It doesn't feel like it's been a year since the last November PAD Chapbook Challenge began, but I suppose we're almost there. (Click here to read about the 2009 November PAD Chapbook Challenge.)

To get everyone in the November PAD Chapbook Challenge mood, I thought I'd interview the 2008 winner: Shann Palmer. Her 11-poem collection, Change, was chosen by Tammy and I from more than 50 chapbook submissions.

Here's a personal favorite of mine:

Patience

There must be a place
where old men wait
for wives to be ready
to couple and uncouple,

give foot rubs after
they shop for couches,
remember to buy bulbs
for living room lamps.

Bearded men who regret
haste having discovered
the wisdom of a light touch,
a dark room, a cool breeze.

A mountain understands,
endures what nature brings.

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What have you been up to the past year?

This year I read at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts "Art After Hours" program, a real honor. In April, I participated in the National Poetry Month Pledge Drive for the American Academy of Poets and was one of two national winners--they sent a box stuffed with books, CDs, doodads, and flair! Published in Shakespeare's Monkey Review, the Twitter poets issue of Ocho, a poem in a new chapbook out by the Private Press coming soon. In July, I attended the Writers Workshop at West Virginia University (my sixth time) workshopping with poet Shara McCallum. Somewhere in between we've been repairing/redoing our kitchen and bathroom (like my poems, yet undone).

On November 13, I have a poetry reading with local SlamRichmond champ Tom Prunier called "Big Man, Little Woman" at art6 Gallery where I run regular readings and local art events for poets. I also play piano for a local musical improv group, Iprov--we have a festival performance on November 7. Plus all the regular life and job stuff!

What were you expecting to get out of the November PAD Challenge last year? And did you get it?

I always expect to create a group of poems to refine and hopefully, publish. If five out of thirty find a home, I'm pleased. Writing is a skill, like piano playing or composition--you have to constantly work at the craft so when the perfect motif pops into your head, you can assemble the best words (in the right order). To have my collection picked as winner was very gratifying. I'd say this was my most successful attempt! (I also PADded in April and July).

You self-published your collection Change as a chapbook. What appeals to you about self-publishing your poetry?

Self-publishing is immediate, I've been making chapbooks for myself and friends since 1997. At readings, people seem to always ask for a copy of certain poems, by doing small chapbooks, I can easily provide a copy. I suspect it also makes me lazy, since I continue doing small books instead of compiling a larger collection to submit. Not having a 'real' book probably prevents me from being asked to read or panel at some literary events.

Also, I've had the good fortune to check out some of your other self-published pieces, such as A Little Bag of Love (a little bag with love poems inside) and Poems from the apron pocket (a small chapbook made from a single, multi-folded piece of paper). Both are inventive ways to package poetry. How do you go about distributing these poems?

So many ways! I stick them in between poetry books at bookstores, leave them in coffee shops, hand them out at readings, sell them at art galleries, give them as gifts, teach workshops on how to make them, hand them to strangers on the street, send them to friends in letters and cards. I thought about stapling them to telephone poles but I'm pretty sure it's against the law in Richmond.

What do you feel makes a great collection of poetry?

Compelling poems. Great stories. Details that draw me in even when I don't have a reason to read on. Poems that don't tell me everything, give me room to bring my experiences to the page as I read. Themed collections are not my favorites--though Colosseum by Katie Ford (this years VCU Levis prize winner) is excellent. I prefer the loosely organized work of Tony Hoagland; he's my favorite poet.

Do you have any advice for poets taking on the Poetic Asides November PAD Chapbook Challenge?

Write about anything, keep it simple, don't worry if you think it's awful. These poems should be considered drafts, not finished. I've written some of my worst and best poems during challenges, the rewrite, rethinking process is where the magic happens. Most of all, don't sweat it--the poetry police will not come to your door if you miss a day--it's your words in the end that matter.

Oh yes, PLEASE SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POETS! (And independent bookstores!)

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Interview With Poet (and My Wife) Tammy Foster Brewer!

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:44:52 GMT

As I mentioned earlier, my wife Tammy's second chapbook, No Glass Allowed, was recently published by verve bath press. Meanwhile, I've resisted the urge to interview Tammy for more than two years now. But the release of a poetry collection is too much for me to pass, especially when the poems are all so good. (Seriously, I loved Tammy's writing even before we started dating. No, really.)

Tammy's writing has been (or will soon be) published in publications such as storySouth, The Pedestal, RATTLE, and others. She received her BA in English at Georgia State University and promptly became a paralegal. She was born, raised and still resides in Atlanta, Georgia--and can be reached via e-mail at tammyfbrewer@gmail.com.

My personal favorite poem in No Glass Allowed is also framed on my desk in my Atlanta office. Here it is:

Sea Gypsies

You said you spent 5 minutes of your life
today looking for a staple remover.
Something to do with your job.
You edit, and sometimes
there is a need to pull things

apart. There are mountains
between us, and then a river.
The land swells with seeds
that fall from your pockets,
sewing the distance with deep
breaths, an entire city
in your smile.

I tell you about the Mokens,
gypsies of the Andaman Sea.
How they knew to flee the tsunami
before the first wave tore trees
from their roots, husbands from wives.
When the sky turns to salt, sometimes
there is a thirst. In their language

there is no word for want,
only an understanding
of give and take. You said
I took away your need
and you want

to share water with me.
The ground presses its pregnant
belly against my feet. I am
distracted by squirrels
in the trees. Wind.
When.

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What are you up to?

I've got the windows open and I'm listening to the wind and hoping baby Will stays asleep in his swing. And sipping some water and trying not to eat too many pretzel sticks.

Other than that, I have a new chapbook out from Verve Bath Press!

Within the past year, you changed your name--with earlier work as Tammy Foster Trendle and more recent publications as Tammy Foster Brewer. How have you handled that transition? And have there been any surprises (good or bad) as a result?

That's a good question. Foster is my maiden name. The first time I got married, I struggled with the idea of changing my last name. I was a Foster and I was proud of my family and my name. But, I wanted to have children and I thought it would be easier to change my name. My first poetry publications were under my married name--Tammy F. Trendle. I have a lot of publications (including my first chapbook) under that name.

I got divorced and remarried and didn't have any hesitations this time around about changing my name; however, I think I still published one or two poems under my previous name. Once I started publishing under Brewer, I decided to include in my bio my former name (in parenthesis). I joked that I didn't want anyone to think I was plagiarizing Tammy Trendle.

I don't think the name change has caused any confusion in my writing life; however, it causes lots of confusion for the pediatrician whenever I take Reese (my son from my first marriage) because he always addresses me as Ms. Trendle and then apologizes and calls me Ms. Brewer. It's weird having so many aliases--but a little mysterious, too.

The poems in No Glass Allowed have many great linebreaks. Do you have a linebreak strategy when writing poems?

Yeah, I put a lot of thought into my linebreaks. It helps me to type out my poems on the computer, so that I can see the linebreaks clearly and evenly. I like to break my lines at a thought or an image, so that the idea/image changes meaning from one line to the next. Each word in the line adds to the overall idea/image in that line. I like to have what appears to be a simple sentence broken over a few lines so that the words have multiple meanings. I hope that makes sense.

Do you spend much time on revision?

Oh yes. I recently finalized a poem that I started writing 1.5 years ago. Usually, I get the lines down and then I pour over each word methodically until I finally feel like it's done. I am a perfectionist when it comes to my poetry. Every now and then I'll write a poem that only needs a tweek or two. It's a great feeling when those poems come so easily. (By the way, the poem I just mentioned that took me 1.5 yrs to finalize is going to be published in the upcoming Winter issue of RATTLE.)

Your poetry has appeared in several publications--in addition to your two chapbooks. How do you handle your submission process?

It's funny. I think I go through phases where I write write write and then I submit submit submit. I'm not very organized with my submission process. Fortunately, I've had several instances where editors have contacted me about publishing my poetry. (I always put my e-mail address in my bio which I think helps.) I think I'm just about at a point where I've submitted all of my good stuff and now it's time for me to write more.

Speaking of writing more. Where or how do you tend to find inspiration for your writing?

A lot of times I get inspiration from reading other poets or from looking at pieces of art. Whenever I get stumped or feel like I need inspiration, I'll look at artwork and start writing out ideas that pop in my head. Also, I get a lot of inspiration from listening to other people (especially my kids). Something said in an everyday conversation becomes a line in a poem. Also, driving helps. During my long commute to Atlanta for work, I get ideas just from looking out the window. I'm a daydreamer.

When you're reading other poets, what do you look for in a good poem?

I think a good poem makes me feel. I remember reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in high school and getting goosebumps (that's when I knew I was a poetry freak). I like a poem that can take language and twist it on its head. To read something that seems ordinary and simple on the outside but has many layers of meaning beneath. I think a good poem is one that even non-poets enjoy and appreciate.

Who are you reading currently?

I just finished re-reading Jessica Dawson's chapbook, Fossil Fuels (also published by Verve Bath Press). I'm also reading Cheryl Dumesnil's In Praise of Falling. Of course, I always like to read some Bob Hicok. I am a big fan of the small press and small press poets--Pris Campbell, Amanda Oaks, Jacob Johansen, Barton Smock to name a few.

If you could offer only one piece to other poets, what would it be?

Never forget you are a poet.

Final question: Who's your favorite poet named Robert?

You, silly.

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Learn more about No Glass Allowed and verve bath press at http://www.wordsdance.com/intent.html

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Interview With Poet Sydney Lea

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:59:35 GMT

I discovered Sydney Lea earlier this year while reading issue five of New Ohio Review. I loved both his poems, but especially "Early Life." As the founder and former editor of New England Review, I suppose I should've already known his work. Lea has published a novel, A Place in Mind, and two collections of nonfiction, Hunting the Whole Way Home and A Little Wildness.

Lea's most recent collection, Ghost Pain (Sarabande Books), is his eighth volume of poems. Its predecessor, Pursuit of the Wound, was a Pulitzer finalist and his To the Bone: New and Selected Poems was co-winner of the Poets' Prize. He's received fellowships from nearly everywhere and currently teaches at Dartmouth College.

Here's one of my favorites from his collection Ghost Pain:

Evening Walk as the School Year Starts

When was the last lobotomy, I wonder?
Too late for Carl at least, whom it's all but hopeless
to think of as a whipsaw of hateful passion
that would if it could have torn up his mother and father,
mild as they are; but that's how old villagers say
Carl acted before he was cut. Their smiles are rueful.
They shake their heads, subtle. A raven, unsubtle,
grates from a hemlock as Carl steps into sight.

His wave's familiar: he jerks and drops one palm.
How old must he be? He's ageless. His eyes are empty--
the operation. He turns now: ninety degrees,
then ninety again like a sentry, the other way.
He turns the same on each warm evening, retreating
past the house of our mutual neighbor, who will not speak
to Carl's father, for reasons likely beyond recall.
It seems a shame not to edit grievances.

It's some awful stink nearby that draws the raven,
but the rest of the world seems fixed on the morbid too:
a squirrel keeps pouring spruce cones down at me;
a gall-blighted butternut groans; the broadleafs wilt;
there's a pair of toads at my feet that wheels have flattened
side by side, like cartoon icons of failure;
mosquitoes strafe me, a mammoth dragonfly--
one of the season's last--attacks a moth

so close to me I can hear the fatal click.
The other day a son went off to college.
His mother and I are quietly beside ourselves.
We embrace each other harder now, and vow,
as one vows, to love our children harder too.
Though I hum to distract myself, the raven dives
loud as gunfire through brush to its mess. I jump,
but Carl doesn't seem to hear. I watch him limp

to his family's drive--then again that sure right angle.
Like him, our family finds a virtue in order:
we rise at six to eat our breakfasts together,
then make a certain sandwich for one of the girls,
a certain one for the other; we leave at seven;
we gather the girls promptly at end of school.
Carl opens his door and shuts it--click--behind him.
It's after Labor Day, it's end-of-summer,

it's another season upon us. Now he scolds me,
the squirrel on his branch, his store of weapons gone.
Why me, dumb brute? I haven't done anything wrong,
I've got no grievance with him--not with anyone really.
The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide.
The wishing star is not enough to light
the space around me while this bit of hymn from my schooldays
plays, while daytime's creatures crawl to cover,

and night ones, having no choice, confront the night.

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What are you up to?

Well, I just finished a teaching term at Dartmouth. My grad students are adults, many of them high school teachers in search of an advanced degree, and I feel, in my semi-retirement (one course per term), as though I'd died and gone to heaven. The students have been around the block a bit, have had jobs, marriages, children, deaths to contend with, and so on; to that extent, they command subject matter that's often beyond undergrads experience. That's not the undergrads fault, of course. I am moved and inspired by the examples of these aspirant writers in the grad program. Teaching them, to the extent that I can call it that, allows me to stay in touch with a younger generation, have a good deal of time left over for my own writing, and--almost best of all--though I am asked to, I never go to faculty meetings.

I'm also much engaged in non-literary undertakings. I'm the vice-president of Central Vermont Adult Basic Education, which is above all a literacy endeavor, literacy now including computer literacy and more and more, even here in Vermont, English as a second language. CVABE serves three Vermont counties and offers instruction to a thousand students a year. I've been a trustee for almost two decades.

I have also long been involved in a conservation effort in Washington County, Maine, where I, like my late father, have had a camp for decades and decades. Lately the local land trust bought the development rights on 345,000 acres, and bought 34,000 acres outright to be run as a sustainable community forest. Now another 22,000 acres has come on the market rather unexpectedly, so I need to help raise several million more dollars beyond the 35 that the last campaign required. In the grand scheme of things, my contribution to saving these pristine woods and waters may end up being the most important thing--beyond raising five kids--I'll have done.

I have just sold a ninth collection of poems to Four Way Books too, and am trying to finish a second novel; I hope to have it close enough to complete to let my agent look at it in fall.

You're the founder and former editor of New England Review. As an editor, what do you feel makes a good poem?

Oh, there is no short answer to that one! Fact is, I rather shy from the frequent tendency among authors, editors and publishers to choose up teams. If as a poet in my own right, for example, I tend toward formalism, no one could ever force me into positing that approach as ipso facto superior. I love Don Justice in his formal mode, for example, but I also love Allen Ginsberg at his best. I do tend to dislike obscurantism, and ditto preciousness, and I can't for the life of me see what so-called L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry is for.

Ghost Pain was your eighth volume of poems. How do you go about assembling a collection?

I was lucky enough to have Robert Penn Warren as a mentor when I was a younger man, and his description of how he knew he was done with a book still strikes home for me. He says that you write and you write and you write, and in due course you realize that a certain curve of energy has completed itself, that the stuff you are writing now is differently motivated from what you've been doing for some time. I know that's vague, but I can't seem to do better, in that I don't conceive of collections in an aprioristic, programmatic way.

You teach at Dartmouth College. Does teaching inform or influence your writing?

I may have answered that question above, at least in part. The plain truth is that I haven't been entirely innocent of stealing "ideas" from students, ones that they may have been too new at the game to have pulled off successfully. But that's a rarity. Teaching is important to me as a hedge against adopting a mood like Hemingway's at his worst: Long time ago good, now no good. For forty years, in every course I have found at least one young woman or man who bolsters my faith not only in poetry but also in human nature. Also, by my own choice I live a long way from alleged centers of sophistication, which is helpful to me in that it keeps me from the occasional belief of writers in this era of Creeping MFAism that EVERYONE is concerned with literature. Few of my neighbors are concerned with it, at least in the way that the MFAer may be. And yet I do need the "fix" of talking passionately about poetry, fiction, creative writing" in general, and I get it via my students; I get it a lot more from them than from academic colleagues at any rate.

Ghost Pain includes the long poem "A Man Walked Out." What's the most challenging aspect of writing a long poem?

Here's the weird thing. I have written a number of long poems, starting perhaps with "The Feud" in my second collection, moving through "To the Bone" from my 1996 new and selected, into "A Man Walked Out" and most lately into something called "Birds:A Farrago" from my forthcoming book, Young of the Year. And each of these poems seems somehow to have been given to me. Each seems to have followed on a fairly long period of disinclination from writing. Not writer's block but disinclination (whose causes remain unknown to me). Then these poems come in a rush, and I rarely do much in the way of revising them. Is that "inspiration?" I don't know, don't even know if I believe in such a thing, really; rather, I believe these gimmes are the payoff for all those hours of revision that I have put into shorter poems.

So in a sense I am a poor candidate to answer your question. I don't conceive of long poems; they present themselves to me helter skelter. Weird, as I say.

Your poetry has been published in several publications over the years. How do you manage your submissions?

Oh, nothing special: I wait until I have, say, three poems that seem to be as good as they are ever going to be, and then I send them out. After three decades plus, needless to say I have certain favorite journals and editors, and I tend to give them first crack. No, that sounds immodest. They are the readers, rather, who I hope may smile on one of the ones I send on. I have had the experience of landing so many poems with editor X, however, that I begin to feel as if he or she is not sufficiently resistant to what I am doing; I need to overcome real critical skepticism in order to trust that the poem is significant to someone beside myself.

Who or what are you currently reading?

I am rereading the two latest books by Maxine Kumin. At 66, it strengthens me to see someone almost twenty years older doing such marvelous work, probably the best of her wonderful career. I am also reading Elizabeth Strout's stunning novel, Olivia Kitteredge. I read a great deal, too, in natural history publications. A delightful advantage of having given up my specifically academic inclinations a long time ago, despite my unlamented Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, is that I don't think I need to read in a muscular way, to cover a field or keep up with critical postures. I enjoy, in Eliot's delicious phrasing, "the poet's necessary laziness."

If you could offer only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Oh, I am a terrible advice-giver, or rather just not inclined to give it at all. My way to practice writing is that and that alone; it is not "right" except for me, is not necessarily shareable. To the degree that it may be shared, I prefer to pass it on by way of engaging in dialogue, not laying down rules and prescriptions. I do have one piece of advice to my students, though: write a lot for, say, a decade, in the sure faith that anything you do with diligence for a long time is something you'll get better at. You may not get great (who's to make that judgment anyhow in our lifetimes?), but you WILL get better. I suspect that there were people out there who had as much talent as Michael Jordan, to use an analogy; Michael Jordan became Michael Jordan, though, because he relentlessly practiced his moves.

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* To learn more about Sydney Lea, go to www.sydneylea.net

* To learn more about Sarabande Books, go to www.sarabandebooks.org

* To learn more about Four Way Books, go to www.fourwaybooks.com

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If you're a poet or publisher interested in a Poetic Asides interview, click here to see how we may be able to make that happen.

Interview With Poet Cati Porter

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:04:11 GMT

Cati Porter is founder and editor-in-chief of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry and associate editor (poetry) for Babel Fruit, and is the author of a chapbook of prose poems, small fruit songs (Pudding House Publications), and a full-length collection, Seven Floors Up (Mayapple Press). Cati also participated in the April PAD Challenge this year on Poetic Asides.

small fruit songs is a fun little chapbook--not only is the entire collection prose poems, but they also all explore fruit topics. Good stuff. Meanwhile, Seven Floors Up is a little more of a traditional collection, though it is still a whole lot of fun. In fact, one of Porter's strengths as a poet is her sense of humor.

Here's one of my favorites from Seven Floors Up:

"Caution Please Do Not Try to Turn
the Head Forcefully by Hand!"

(Label found on my son's jeans after his first day of preschool)

I don't know where it came from but it's there, stuck
to his grubby little knee as though someone

saw his small head, how tragically
fragile, how it could turn, like a lid, quite

around. I am grateful to whoever had the foresight
to apply that label, grateful that they did not choose

"Open Me First" or "Discard After _____,"
grateful they turned my attention to the fact

that someday someone may turn his head.

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What are you up to?

Well, right now I'm listening to a screaming child tell me I'm mean. It's the last week of school for my boys before their summer vacation. What that means for me is that I'm frantically trying to finish up any projects that require quiet time. I'm now in the middle stages of putting together a second manuscript which is, I think, a departure from the poems in Seven Floors Up; it's very associative and image-driven. Most of the poems in this collection were written in the last year or so, with the core comprised of poems written during NaPoWriMo, after prompts posted to the Poetic Asides blog. I've also been forcing myself to make time to send out more of my work -- the new poems, as well as my chapbook, (al)most delicious, an ekphrastic series after Modigliani's nudes.

I'm also just finishing my first year in Antioch University's MFA program, and preparing for the next residency which is coming up fast. I've been doing a lot of reading, some for the seminars, but mostly for my field study, and have a pile of Marilyn Nelson's and Molly Bendall's books on my desk.

Oh, and I'm beginning to read the submissions that are coming through for Poemeleon's gender issue.

As the Editor-in-Chief of Poemeleon and poetry editor of Babel Fruit, what do you feel makes a good poem?

There are lots of good poems. So so many competently and compellingly good poems. For me, though, they all have certain things in common. And that's the drawback. What's really rare, though, is the great poem, which is so much harder to define: It's the one that hits me in the gut; It's the one that makes everything become suddenly clear, or makes what was previously clear so utterly muddled that I'm dumbstruck. Good poems make me want to sit down and write until my fingers ache. Great poems leave me wondering if I'll ever be able to write again.

But great poems are difficult. In order to write great poems, we must first write good poems. (And of course, before that and in-between, the essential bad poems.)

Both good poems as well as great poems employ craft, image, music, voice, and use them to forward the ideas embedded in the poem. The devices inform, rather than dictate, the shape of the poem, become integral to the movement of a piece -- both on the page and in the head. To take a step back, what separates a good poem from a bad poem? The usage of those same devices: A bad poem uses them to ill effect -- sets out to write a sonnet and writes one, no matter whether the end rhymes are forced, syntax needlessly inverted, the phrases stilted and awkward. A good poem never does that, not without good cause.

But the difference between a good poem and a great poem? That's a little more subtle, but I think it's that gut punch. If it's not there, I might be willing to hang around with it for a while, but it's not the one I'm going to remember down the road.

small fruit songs is a collection of prose poems about fruit. What do you like about the prose poem as a poetic form?

At the time I was writing small fruit songs, I had previously been in love with received forms and was trying them all out. Often my results fell under the "bad poem" heading. But one day, after deciding that I wanted to write a series that used fruit-related terminology as its impetus, I sat down and just allowed my subconscious to take over, and what came out was very associative, unstructured, and organic, which felt like the right choice for the material.

What I like most about the prose poem is its versatility. I've read prose poems that read like stories, prose poems that read like excerpts from a training manual, lyric prose poems, prose poems as dramatic monologue, prose poems as pseudo-journalism, surrealist prose poems.... That said, as versatile as it is, I don't think the prose poem is the end-all, beat-all. It's not functional if the form is forced.

Do you have a writing routine?

I wish! I prefer writing in the very early morning when the house is quiet, but with kids and with a household to run, I have to be more fluid. I used to get up in the middle of the night, but I can only take so much sleep deprivation. I do get up at about five or five-thirty, sometimes earlier, but most days I need a couple cups of coffee -- and an empty house -- to be productive. If I can't finish what I'm working on while they're at school, it's catch-as-catch-can. And I can't use anything but a computer. My handwriting is awful so even if I manage to scribble a few lines while out running around, usually I can't read it later!

Seven Floors Up has some very funny poems in it, including poems inspired by eBay listings. What do you think helps make a humorous poem effective?

Humor is unpredictable. You never know what's going to strike someone as funny. My boys and I spent about an hour watching flashmob videos on YouTube yesterday. One of them was for the Best Funeral Ever. Later I described the scene to my husband. He said, "That's not funny." But it was to us, to me. I laughed hysterically at the sight of thirty people dressed in black showing up and pretending to know the deceased. Which now sounds so totally ludicrous, and inconsiderate.

At Poemeleon we recently published an issue on humorous poems which included a great essay by Renee Ashley on involuntary comedy. Humor is very personal. Heck, all poetry is personal. But what one person finds funny another may think is just plain dumb. I think the trick is not to set out to write a funny poem. If something strikes you as funny, and you decide you want to use it in a poem, do it right then and there before you lose the spark. When my husband was searching eBay for businesses for sale, he happened upon this thing called an inflatable church. I just started laughing. And I knew I wanted to write about it. So I stayed up late that night and got a first draft out. But it's not enough for the poem to be funny -- in order for it to be an effective poem it must also contain some other relevant nugget of wisdom or what have you. In the case of the inflatable church, I found it not just funny, but almost blasphemous (and I'm not a religious person), and in a strange way somewhat true -- thinking about prosperity churches and such, in their depiction of a church as a business opportunity.

How did you go about putting together your collections Seven Floors Up and small fruit songs?

Seven Floors Up was a long time in the making. Before it was published, it made the rounds as a chapbook titled Where We Dwell, which itself began as a chapbook titled Seven Floors Up to the Kitchen of the Soul, a title I had hoped to return to but which my publisher thought was too long so it was shortened. The poems were written over the course of about eight years, beginning when my first son was born up until just weeks before the book went to press. And I spent hours, literally hours, laying all of the poems out and ordering them until it felt right.

With small fruit songs, I fiddled with it for a little while, but then noticed a trend -- the narrative seemed to follow the same trajectory as the alphabet, so I just put them in alphabetical order, and, Voila!, it was done. Oh, and I should mention, it was written in under seven days and had a publisher in ten. Go figure.

Who are you currently reading?

I've been reading a lot of work that's been loosely dubbed Gurlesque: Brenda Shaughnessy, Chelsea Minnis, Catherine Wagner, plus Arielle Greenberg; I've especially loved reading Ann Carson & Alice Notley. And of course Marilyn Nelson and Molly Bendall. I actually have a running list (with annotations) of books that I've read recently on the "What I'm Reading" tab on my blog.

If you could offer only one piece of advice to your fellow poets, what would it be?

Write bad poems. Take risks. Learn from them. Don't get bogged down in endless revisions. If it's a bad poem know when to let it go. Then go write a better poem.

*****

* Learn more about Cati Porter at her blog: http://catiporter.wordpress.com/

* For more on Seven Floors Up and Mayapple Press, go to www.mayapplepress.com

* For more on small fruit songs and Pudding House Publications, go to www.puddinghouse.com

* For more on Poemeleon, go to www.poemeleon.org

* For more on Babel Fruit, go to www.babelfruit.org

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in a Poetic Asides interview, click here to find out how you might be able to make it happen.

Interview With Poet Jim Schley

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:40:24 GMT

Jim Schley's first full-length collection of poetry, As When, In Season, was released in 2008 by Marick Press. However, he is no stranger to poetry. Schley is the former executive director of The Frost Place, a museum and poetry center based at Robert Frost's former homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire, and he's currently a managing editor at Tupelo Press (which publishes some of my favorite poetry titles).

As When, In Season is a wonderful collection that includes nine odes for female muses. Here's one of my favorite poems:

Autumn Equinox

The morning glories
continue knowing
nothing,

but such a caprice,
that lavish clambering toward
--what? Only sunlight.
For this they open, every day.

The grief
I feel can't be
described.

In moonlight broad
as the sprawled land we look across
the blossoms are closed
like miniature umbrellas,
our clothes on the line
colorless yet bright
beneath a white platter of mercury

that orbits a world
where our dear ones
die.

These nights we hear transports
from the airbase upstate.
These days I hear fighter jets
going east
at ungodly speeds.

The morning glories are
--what color?
"Blue as our girl's eyes," or bluer.
Tinted rose, as wishful thinking is said to be.
Wrinkled slightly like crepe paper
with white centers,
on avid green vines that climb
whatever we do

defying all
but
the killing frost.

*****

What are you up to?

For the past three years I worked as director of a museum and poetry-conference center at one of Robert Frost's former homes, which was the most pressurized job I can imagine. I had the sensation of being scalded by adrenaline, continuously--I could never complete all my tasks, and the tension never, ever abated. When I was laid off last autumn I was very sad, but I've also experienced a tremendous relief and release from basically impossible responsibilities.

For me, solving the riddle of how to make a living is inextricably connected with making a haven in my mind and imagination for creative ventures. If I'm too rattled by circumstance, I read (constantly), but I don't write poems. Along with teaching adult students in a community college setting, I've now found a couple of jobs editing for pay, and I find this blend suits me well — the editor's total attention to incremental details and fine-tuned schedules and costs, and the teacher's gregarious accessibility, which is really a form of performance.

My life is much calmer than it's been in a long time. Presently I'm concentrating on finding a viable balance between the work I do for a livelihood and the more open-ended, purposeful yet (at times) "aimless" exploring a poet needs to learn and grow. I'm re-immersing myself in a long-term project that incorporates forms of prose and verse as well as documentary historical materials: the story of a mysterious heirloom, a nineteenth-century eagle-feathered headdress from the northern Plains region. My family is trying to understand where this belongs, in perpetuity, and I'm both a participant in the family quest and a chronicler, observing from a slight distance.

You've toured extensively with experimental and activist theater companies, including the world-renowned Bread and Puppet Theater. What was your role typically? And what were those experiences like?

I worked for a number of years with one of the most accomplished and influential theater artists of our time, sculptor and director Peter Schumann, whose unique creations with Bread and Puppet Theater are known throughout the world. Bread and Puppet is a radically pacifist, communal troupe, metamorphosing over time, and swelling from small touring ensembles to enormous crowds of performers, depending on the needs of a given project. I was involved in that theater for about eight years, and I also spent three years with another traveling theater, Les Montreurs d’Images, which is based in Geneva, Switzerland. Both are very international in atmosphere and orientation, and along with the thrill of becoming a strong performer (I'm an excellent stilt dancer and skilled in using masks) I loved the experience of working among puppeteers, dancers, and musicians from many countries, in a fantastic ferment of languages. I also loved the ways, as performers, we were each involved in all aspects of a production, with no division between "artistic" and "technical" tasks. And because I'm a good administrator and communicator, I specialized in tour coordination.

I continue to feel that theater has the most comprehensive scope of any art, from the minuscule details to the grand, sweeping movements, blending visuals and sonic elements, text and gesture, what filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky called "sculpting in time."

The theaters with which I've mainly worked aren't "naturalistic," in the typical (American) sense of portraying realistic episodes of daily life. Instead, Bread and Puppet and those who've been influenced by Peter Schumann's approach create dreamlike, physically arduous, encompassing visual and musical sequences of images and sounds, often without words, or with words used in perpendicular ways. Many of our pieces utilized the motley, manic format of circuses. The opportunity to immerse myself in work where words were seen with circumspection and even suspicion--and where the English language was by no means primary--was disorienting and provocative to me, as a writer. For years I felt as if what I most fully understood to be "poetry" could be reached more decisively with theater pieces, not with verse on a page. I'm reminded of how Wallace Stevens imperative for poetry, in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction": "It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure." Abstraction, change, and pleasure . . . these are also the qualities of virtuosic circus techniques, as practiced by many of my theater colleagues during that crucial era of my artistic life.

I suppose that now my poems, in many respects--especially their fascination with audible textures and with syntactical "choreography"--aspire to be theater pieces.

You live with your family on an "off-the-grid cooperative" in Vermont. What's that like?

Since my college days, I've been drawn to communal living. This has been a complement to also being inclined toward generous supplies of solitude. Our present arrangement is a modest miracle: in 1986, a group of individuals and couples bought a beautiful, neglected hill farm and 150 acres, and almost twenty-five years later we're still here, still largely the same group. We're incorporated as a cooperative, and while each household has a fair degree of autonomy (and legal title to a house), we share in sensibility and also take care of many practical necessities together. This is a low-key, very good-humored, really intelligent little neighborhood, and I've felt well supported here as a person, a civic activist, and an artist. My wife and I were able to build our own home entirely, from the ground up, with the help of neighbors and friends. And our electricity comes from solar modules and golf-cart batteries, because the regular power line ends a mile away, which we were emboldened to try because our neighbors were doing likewise.

In your collection As When, In Season, you have a section of nine odes. What do you feel makes an effective ode?

An ode is an ancient verbal-song of praise. Pindar's seminal odes were composed for choral voices, with cresting lines and surging acclaim for athletes and other heroes, and they combine rhythms and images in daring ways, reaching for ecstasy through reasoning and metaphor. I've loved reading and hearing the Greek myths since childhood, and that feeling was refreshed and transmuted as I rediscovered those stories, reading to our daughter when she was tiny (which I still do today, when she's sixteen). In graduate school I wrote a seventy-page essay examining every aspect of Keats's marvelously varied, fluid yet precise "Ode to a Nightingale." I wondered if a poet today could write a compelling ode in a natural contemporary idiom. There's a certain grandeur, in tone and amplitude, I was reaching toward . . .

Years ago I had the idea of writing a series of portraits of crucial female teachers; I intended to make a set of nine, each named for one of the mythological muses, and each representing a certain domain of knowledge and action. In my view, these muses wouldn't be the inspirers of a male artist, but would be virtuosos in their own right. I couldn't find a suitable structure for this "suite" of poems, in which I knew the musical component needed to be particularly strong. In the mid-1990s I began experimenting with an invented form, which I called a chanoine after the French word for chain, and this time (probably my third or fourth attempt) the series came together steadily. Each poem has thirteen rhymes on the same sound, and there are many, many images and allusions; for some readers, my odes may seem too full, as I've tried to see how far I can push the momentum of the sentences in relation to the "staves" or measures of the lines, using syntax for flex and spring. While the form is the tightest I've ever used, the writing process was euphoric, as I learned firsthand how much artists gain (including the most absorbing pleasure) by addressing a resilient, resistive vessel of form.

The muse poems are each a portrait of a specific person (or in one instance two people, entwined), writers and artists, also my wife and our daughter. Only one of them is named outright (the poem for Grace Paley uses "grace" as the rhyme-sound). Whether these poems succeed as odes with respect to the whole tradition, I can't know, but I love reading them to audiences. I have the sense that they reach a listener through the ears more directly than they reach a reader through the eyes, and I'm making plans to do a recording of my delivery, where I can attend closely to pacing and clarity.

This is your first full-length collection, yet you're very experienced in the poetry world. How long did it take you to get this collection together?

From an early age, I knew I wanted to make a living through reading and writing, and soon after college I started work as a literary editor, apprenticing to the boundlessly dedicated and knowledgeable Sydney Lea, founder of the journal New England Review. This led to other editorial jobs, which were entwined with my theater work.

Like most young writers, I made efforts to get my work published, with only sporadic success. Meanwhile, I edited more than a hundred books in a variety of fields, including poetry, fiction, and essays. Gradually I came to an understanding of what the book I'd want to publish would be like, in texture and shape. With a state arts council grant, I published a chapbook in 1999, featuring the muse sequence and four lullabies, which was a 150% good experience, and in 2006 after I'd entered a round of book contests to no avail, I decided instead to publish another chapbook, with a new linked series. At that point the poet Ilya Kaminsky asked to see my manuscript for Marick Press. He and publisher Mariela Griffor said "Yes," and all of a sudden the book was being produced, to my surprise (and relief).

You're a managing editor at Tupelo Press, so I imagine you get to see several very fine collections that get published, as well as good and bad collections that don't quite make the grade. As an editor, what do you think makes a great poetry collection?

I'm presently most involved in the step-by-step production of Tupelo's forthcoming books, working closely with authors on editorial adjustments and working very closely with book designers and printers, a part of the process with which I have a lot of experience. It's extremely exciting to navigate the transformation of a book from word-processing to designed pages, comparable to the translation of a dance or theater work from rehearsal studio to stage.

Even after working as a professional editor since 1980, my answer to your question of what makes a powerful, moving, satisfying book isn't so different from the answer I'd have given as a child or teenaged reader (though my frame of reference is wider, as I've read hundreds and hundreds of books in a number of languages and from many eras). I remain an "innocent" reader: longing to be transported, by imagery and story; willing to be challenged, by language and ideas; most drawn to a dynamic, unfolding relationship between the details of a collection, part by part and passage by passage, and the shape of the whole.

Who are you currently reading?

I read each new book by several splendid, very inventive novelists from New England. I've recently read After You've Gone by Jeffrey Lent, which maneuvers through time in unexpected ways, and am just finishing Ernest Hebert's Spoonwood, which shifts the narrators' vantage as I've never seen before. I'm also rereading--very slowly--two new books of poems, Angela Shaw's splendid The Beginning of the Fields, which I shepherded through production for Tupelo but which is opening for me on all kinds of other levels, now that it's published; and Jody Gladding's Rooms and Their Airs (Milkweed, 2009), the first new book by this astonishingly subtle poet in many years. I'm getting ready to read the only book by W.G. Sebald I haven't yet read, The Rings of Saturn. Along with Czeslaw Milosz, I guess I think of Sebald as the greatest writer of our age. I'm also savoring the prospect of time this summer to read Marilynne Robinson's Home.

If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?

Read! Read aloud! Read to others! (Is that three pieces of advice, or one?)

*****

* Learn more about Jim Schley at www.jimschley.com.

* Learn more about As When, In Season and Marick Press at www.marickpress.com.

* Learn more about Tupelo Press at www.tupelopress.org.

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in being featured in a future Poetic Asides interview, click here to find out how you might be able to make that happen.

Interview with poet Kathryn Stripling Byer

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:24:27 GMT

Kathryn Stripling Byer is the former poet laureate of North Carolina. She has published five poetry collections, most recently Coming to Rest (Louisiana State University Press). She's also one of those rare poets who have a business card.

Coming to Rest is a great collection--even has two Halloween poems. Here's one of my favorites:

Coastal Plain

The only clouds
forming are crow clouds,

the only shade, oaks
bound together in a tangle of oak

limbs that signal the wind
coming, if there is any wind

stroking the flat
fields, the flat

swatch of corn.
Far as anyone's eye can see, corn's

dying under the sky
that repeats itself either as sky

or as water
that won't remain water

for long on the highway: its shimmer
is merely the shimmer

of one more illusion that yields
to our crossing as we ourselves yield

to our lives, to the roots
of our landscape. Pull up the roots

and what do we see but the night
soil of dream, the night

soil of what we call
home. Home that calls

and calls
and calls.

*****

What are you up to?

Just now I've been reading online Eavan Boland's essay in the May issue of Poetry, finding her description of the two contradictory ways of being a poet extremely helpful. With my term as North Carolina's first woman Poet Laureate coming to a close, I've felt the pull of the private grow stronger and stronger, even as I never doubted the importance of the position I held as Laureate. It's rejuvenating to find an essay giving voice to what's been milling around inside my own head, giving it context, both literary and historical, so that I can say, "Yes, I understand the lay of the land a lot better now." The two seemingly antithetical "types" exist in most of us, I think, and I know they do inside me. One minute, get me out of here, then the next, what can I do to bring more North Carolina poets to public notice?

Having finished Boland's essay, I'm now worrying about the tomato plants in our garden. Two of them aren't thriving and one of the heirlooms is being nibbled by something. Rabbit? Raccoon? This afternoon I will hope to get back to some of my own work, print it out, scribble on the pages for a while. I've a new manuscript I'm hoping to place, Descent, which takes me back to the landscape of the deep South from which I came. And what must be dozens of notebooks scattered all over the house containing drafts of poems, essays and stories--I have to track them down! I'm hopelessly disorganized.

You were the poet laureate of North Carolina from 2003 to 2009. What were your responsibilities as North Carolina's poet laureate?

I was told at the outset that I could write my own job description. Well, with Fred Chappell as your predecessor, that's not going to be easy. Fred set quite a high standard, and I knew I was going to have to work hard to meet it. Mostly I wanted to help make poetry accessible in as many ways I could, whether to other poets (we have so many in our state!) or to readers, students, teachers, anyone at all who cared to listen to me on my soapbox.

Right away the Literature Director of the NC Arts Council, Debbie McGill, and I began a web page on the Council site devoted to NC writers, with a poet of the week, new books section, and news. Finally we had to give up the week by week poet; it was a lot of work to keep that going. We moved to a Poets of the Month, and finally to a quarterly web page. I decided to set up my own laureate blog to facilitate what the Council was trying to do, especially now with the budget freeze in place.

So, what else did I do? I wrote occasional poems for libraries, events, really, all sorts of requests. One, even, for someone's 60th birthday! I visited classrooms, gave a lot of readings, answered a lot of e-mails, and wrote a lot of blurbs. I'd say my job description was "always available." I was always trying to track down new voices to share with an audience. Although the council can't afford to search for and select a new laureate till state finances improve, they've asked me to continue the blog, which I'm happy to do. Working on it gives me a lot of satisfaction.

How important do you feel community is for poets?

So many of us, of a certain generation anyway, have embedded in our imaginations the image of the solitary poet, the Romantic standing alone on the summit, brooding over the world below and its connection with the world inside. At the same time, we know that poets need each other, just as they always have, maybe now more than ever, and they need to feel that they are part of their own communities, where they become involved in the cultural and political life of that community. I've tried myself to become involved in various issues important to me locally—the new library, for instance, writing a poem for the groundbreaking, letters to the paper and so forth. The moratorium on new development in our county drew me into writing guest editorials as well as poems.

We are lucky to have a local weekly that cares about such things. The larger newspapers are turning away from their literary pages, even their guest editorials. I know the internet is picking up a lot of the slack. Blogs. Facebook. Twitter. I've just joined Facebook after keeping my distance for a good while. I was warned by a friend, "You will be falling into a black hole." So far I'm still ok, and I'm discovering that I can post news there about my latest laureate features and other literary matters of interest to me. The definition of "community" is changing, no doubt about that, and I still prefer face to face community, but I'll use what I can to make the case for poetry.

North Carolina may be the best state in which to live if you are a writer. The NC Writers Network was begun nearly 30 years ago, and it has worked hard to bring real literary community to the state, a state that for so long had its regions strictly marked—mountain (where writers got little notice), Piedmont (Mecca, as we used to call it) and eastern/coastal, as isolated as the mountains. Now, thanks to NCWN and umbrella organizations like Netwest, among others, I can say that the whole state is Mecca. It didn't happen overnight. It took years of ground-breaking by good people, like Debbie McGill of the Arts Council, Marsha Warren and her stalwarts at NCWN, and all the local folks who came together to form their own literary organizations. Writers need each other and they need to feel a connection with their readers and future readers. It's fine to stand on a mountain-top and brood—I've done that myself--but we have to come back down again and live in our communities. Let our voices be heard.

In Coming to Rest, location factors into several poems. How important do you feel location is to a poet?

I firmly believe a poet has to feel located somewhere, in some physical place where light falls on the ground, the earth grumbles and sings, the leaves fall, the sewage stinks, and so forth. "You have to be from somewhere before you can write about anywhere else," as Fred Chappell, our resident genius, once said. Or as Flannery O'Conner said, "Our limitations are our gateways to reality." My gateway literally squeaked, rusty and old, there was pig-stink all around, my people were hard-scrabble farmers, but it was a way into my first poems. And from there, I could go anywhere. Anywhere!

You work in relationships with your daughter and husband in first person narrative poems. Where do you draw the line between reality and fiction?

Sometimes it’s hard to know where to draw the line. I let the poem itself guide me. The poems drawing in daughter and husband in Coming to Rest were different in that personal inclusion. So many of my earlier poems had been "persona poems," where I could work out any inner narratives through a fictional character--the mountain woman named Alma, for example, or the aging Evelyn. James Dickey's famous statement, "Poetry lies in order to tell the truth," seems apt here, as does Richard Hugo's, "You owe reality nothing, your emotions everything." What I mean is, you fictionalize, you improvise when you come up against what you can't or can't yet say or may never want to say outright. Yes, let's don't forget Dickinson's, "Tell the truth but tell it slant." There are ways of getting around reality into a poetic reality. The poem itself has seemed to draw the line for me when I am paying adequate attention to language and craft. The reality in a poem is, finally, language and how it is used.

How do you handle the submissions process?

Right now I'm not submitting much at all, though I'm happy to oblige if an editor asks me to submit some work. Otherwise I'm dealing with the day-to-day business of being wife, mother, daughter, laureate, friend, and as you see, at the bottom of the list, poet. But can't poet be intertwined with all of the above?

I used to be diligent about the submissions process, keeping records, reading Poets & Writers faithfully, but I came to find the process taking up so much energy—what to send where and when, then the irritation (that's putting it mildly) of rejections, the envy of seeing friends with poems in magazines that had rejected my work, and so on. It began to be tiresome. I'm ready to try again, though, with the new work I've done over the past few months. I've been in P0-biz for 40 years. I still get a thrill from having poems accepted, and I still get pretty testy when they are rejected. I don't want to think of myself as over and done with. I simply won't, and that's all there is to it.

Why do you write poetry?

It's the best way I know to sing with the world. And because I couldn't be Renee Fleming or Emmy Lou Harris. Or Nina Simone.

Who are you currently reading?

Stacked at my bedside are books by Mahmoud Darwish, Tomas Transtromer, Zbigniew Herbert, Sandor Kanyadi, Chitra Divakaruni, Marie Ponsot, Adam Zagajewski, and Nazim Hikmet. I pick up one of them on any given night. Chitra's novels, of course, I read straight through, but I enjoy going back to favorite passages. I'm especially fond of her The Vine of Desire and the novel that comes before it, Sister of My Heart. I'm staying away from most American poetry at the moment, but not NC poetry. You can read my laureate blog to see that I'm keeping up with that.

If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?

I'll have to go with what Maxine Kumin told me years ago, "You have to be stubborn to make it as a poet." That advice was for a young poet struggling to see her first book published, but I think it still stands. By "making it," I now mean keeping it going, growing, digging in your heels and saying, "Here I am." We are a youth obsessed culture, including our literary culture. But women of a certain age like me must keep on keeping on. Living in the South, being thought "regional" by the literary powers-that-be doesn't help. But it doesn't hurt, if you pay them no mind.

It may seem paradoxical that to keep moving, you dig in your heels and stand your ground, but poetry can deal with those paradoxes. All of art can.

*****

* Check out Kathryn's North Carolina Poet Laureate blog at: http://ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com/

* Check out Kathryn's personal blog at: http://kathrynstriplingbyer.blogspot.com/

* Learn more about Coming to Rest and LSU Press at: http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in an interview on this blog, click here to find out how we might be able to make that happen.

Interview with Poet Emma Trelles

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:31:12 GMT

Emma Trelles is the author of Little Spells (GOSS183 press). She's a Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry and an arts and culture journalist. Her work has been published nearly everywhere, including OCHO, Gulf Stream, Newsday, and the Miami Herald. She also teaches creative writing at the Art Center of South Florida and the Florida Center for the Literary Arts.

Little Spells is a fun chapbook, and here's one of my favorite poems:

Gua-Gua

Could be the cry of a dog
or a cartoon baby's mouth
open to a pink cave of tonsils,
the squiggle lines of an animator's pen
bursting from his bald head.

Guaaaaa-Guaaaaa
the blank drone you hear when
you dial out of the Casa Bella in Oaxaca,
or the bleat of dusty buses charging
streets alongside wagons dragged by mares.
In Mexico, it's boooos,
the slurred song of a beer-heavy ghost,
or the love charm Frida sang that lured
men and monkeys from the tamarind trees.

In Miami, Cuba, it's gua-gua,
the "W" sound of water brushed into a dream,
the war between why and wait.
Gua-gua,
the clipped cry from an imperfect memory,
a wish to travel in reverse to an island
shaped like a boomerang.
You can fling it as far as 90 miles and still
feel its edge in your hands.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I'm writing and revising poems for my full length collection, tentatively titled Tropicalia. I should be ready to start sending it out this fall and I'm looking forward to releasing it into the world. I'm also preparing to read in a few weeks at the Palabra Pura series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. Besides that, I've been sending out poems, freelancing art and book stories, teaching creative nonfiction and savoring the rain that's made every garden and lawn in South Florida a blazing green.

How has working as a journalist informed your poetry writing efforts?

I've worked as a full-time journalist since I finished my M.F.A., and writing on deadline for so many years really helped me shape my voice as a poet. In grad school, I was always trying on the diction of others--Sylvia Plath and Campbell McGrath come to mind--because I couldn't quite figure out how to sound like myself and also approach language as art. Writing consistently, even in a completely different genre, helped me discover my own poetic tongue. Journalism has also led me to fodder for poems. Some of the poems in Little Spells, for example, were drafted while on assignment (such as "Gua-Gua" and "Billy Bragg Rescues Us at the F.T.A.A. Protest") and covering visual art has also made me think more deeply about how color and form are used in verse.

You teach creative writing; does that influence your writing?

Definitely. Just last week I was babbling on about how important it is to immerse yourself in a writing project, how accumulating artifacts around your desk or in your notebook is vital to creating. I cited a Diane Arbus print that hangs over my desk as an example: I often consider the photograph--a circus woman & sword swallower--as a metaphor for gender and writing. I watched while one of the writers in the group took notes, and I realized that I was not doing enough of this very immersion.

I'm working on a book; why am I not surrounding myself more with its themes? Where is my own physical shrine to its images and intent? I shared my discovery with the class, and it was a great example of how teaching teaches. You are constantly clarifying process, and your own is illuminated.

How important is location to your writing?

Thus far I've used place as a kind of bedrock for my work. I suppose that's, in part, because I've lived in Florida all my life, and I believe that staying in one place gives a writer, or any artist, the chance to peel away the cliches, the superfluous, the gauze and busyness that keeps us so often from seeing the heart of a thing.

Proust said that the real voyage of discovery exists not in having new landscapes but in having new eyes. I love that quote. Whenever I read it, I remember to burrow into a setting: the shoreline, the kitchen, the causeway serried with cars. I keep looking and writing and and trying to re-imagine it. A poem is a tiny compass that should point you to somewhere.

As a guest editor of MiPOesias (March 2008), did you gain any insight into your own writing?

It made me think about my place in the tradition of Cuban-American writers, which the issue featured, and also how that tradition is mutating as first and second generation poets move farther into this country's culture. There was a time when Cuban American poets wrote mostly about exile and loss through the lens of lament. Now I see these themes explored through speculation, surrealism, urban living or even humor. I can't wait to see what the third wave of writers will offer.

What do you feel makes a great poem?

The best words in their best order! That's Coleridge, of course, but I'll add the ubiquitous "heightened language" and "original thinking" because I think they bear repeating.

Ultimately, what I think makes a great poem is the same as what makes any work of art a stunner--the concurrent feelings of recognition and astonishing discovery.

Who are you currently reading?

Mostly poets. I'm a few pages short of finishing Mark Doty's Fire to Fire. I'm also reading The Light at the Edge of Everything, by Lisa Zimmerman; The Neighborhoods of My Past Sorrow, by Jesse Millner; Hoops, by Major Jackson; and The Life of the Skies, a nonfiction book about people and birds by Jonathan Rosen.

If you could offer up only one piece of advice to your fellow poets, what would it be?

Cultivate your own voice and your instincts. Tend to your work.

*****

* To learn more about Emma's publisher GOSS183, go to www.mipoesias.com

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in the possibility of a Poetic Asides interview, click here to see how you might be able to make that happen.

Interview With Poet April Bernard

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:55:49 GMT

Every so often, I get an unexpected review copy of a poetry collection. Such was the case with April Bernard's Romanticism (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.). Just released earlier this month, this collection was a nice little pre-summer read. In fact, I'd say the poems in Romanticism are perfect reading for summer nights.

Here's one of my favorites:

Romance

I pine. There is an obstacle to our love.

Every time I hear the postman, I think: At last, the letter!
He has overcome the obstacle--

(It is a large obstacle, an actual alp, with a tree line and sheer rock face
streaked with snow even in July)

for love of me! For three years, nine decades, and one century or so, there
has been no letter. I still wait for the letter.

But lately I wonder if my predicament is outside the human,
neither noble nor farcical; if my heart courts pain

because it aimes for immortality, something grander
than I can imagine. Most of what I imagine,

what I want, is small: Hands with mine in the sink, washing dishes,
the smell of wool, feet tangling mine in bed. I know

the gods punish the proud, but I do not yet know
why they punish the humble. Although after all

it is not humble to ask, every minute or so, for happiness.

*****

What are you up to?

I'm using the conventions, underlying ideas, and some of the forms of Romantic period poetry and song lyrics for my own purposes.

In the press release for your collection, it claims that Romanticism the book looks to investigate Romanticism the idea. What's your take on the intersection of Romanticism and poetry?

Romanticism means many things: It means the primacy of feeling; an embrace of the irrational (in reaction to the Augustan Age of Reason); a championing of the individual in terms of democratic rights and a repudiation of the monarchy in revolutionary fervor. The great Romantic poets of the Romantic Age were of course Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats & Byron (and there were others). The impulse towards what we call the "Romantic" existed long before the actual period (circa 1770-1830) and it persisted long after. The operas of the 19th century, many writers of the Victorian age and even well into the 20th century, are participating in a Romanticist aesthetic. It exists today as one of the possibilities available to all artists. In music, painting, fiction poetry, etc.

Do you have a favorite romantic poem?

Of the classic Romantic poets, I have a hard time choosing among the many great poems, but if I had to I'd pick Keats's "To Autumn." It is one of the most beautiful poems ever written, sublime in its swoop of feeling, its tactile sense of ripeness and melancholy in the same moment.

This is your fourth poetry collection. How do you go about assembling your collections of poems?

Each one is different. The simplest way to describe how I wrote this one is to say that early on I had the idea of writing from and about the Romantic period in my head, and as poems arose they either suited my central theme or they didn't. Those that didn't I put aside. I was very excited when I got the idea of writing the "lieder" and then the opera arias, and could have continued with that indefinitely. Indeed I still am.

Your individual poems have been published in many fine publications, including A Public Space, The New Yorker, and Agni. How do you handle submitting your poems to publications?

The same way everybody does; I send out a group of poems to the editor, hoping one or two will catch his or her eye. Luckily for me, as I have published more books I am more frequently asked to submit work and can feel sure at least that someone will read it.

You teach at Bennington College. Does teaching inform or influence your writing?

I love teaching. I had a long career as a magazine and book editor, and I find teaching is vastly more energizing for my own work—though of course too much can also be exhausting. I am a missionary for reading; I love to teach literature, and believe that the only way to become a good writer is by reading. (By the way, I will continue to teach in the Bennington MFA program, but as of this fall I will be Director of Creative Writing at Skidmore College.)

Who or what are you currently reading?

My graduate students; Dickens; Lyndall Gordon's excellent biography of T.S. Eliot; Dan Hofstadter's The Love Affair as a Work of Art; Cavafy; Ingeborg Bachman.

If you could offer only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Read the greats; don't waste your time with ephemera. That includes Shakespeare, also Elizabeth Bishop, also Frank Bidart, also Henry James and G.M. Hopkins and P.G. Wodehouse. And Austen and Chekhov and Milton and Dickinson and....

*****

To learn more about April Bernard's collection Romanticism, go to the W.W. Norton site at: www.wwnorton.com

To check out other poet interviews on Poetic Asides, click here.

*****

If you're a publisher or poet interested in a Poetic Asides interview, click here to see how we might be able to make that happen.

Interview With Poet Campbell McGrath

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:04:36 GMT

Campbell McGrath's epic poem Shannon has just been released by Ecco. McGrath is the author of seven previous collections, including Seven Notebooks, Pax Atomica, and Capitalism, and is an award-winning poet. He teaches at Florida International University in Miami, where he is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing.

Shannon was a nice breath of fresh air. It's an epic poem and a poem that tells the story of George Shannon, the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The poem is a fictionalized account of what happens to Shannon during a 16-day stretch he was lost from the rest of the group. The poem was a very fun read.

Here's a small excerpt from one of the sections:

This land is grown chastened
& changed somewhat
These past days
Hard traveling. Dust-ridden
Scoured & coarse
Not a tree
On the horizon all day
Only buffalo herds
Unbroken some hours keeping pace.
All these grazing creatures fed upon
The grass of these plains
Is it not strange
To believe that I might feed
A host of nations
Upon my own heart, feeling it swell so?

In a land of plenty
I travel hungry.

In a country of herds
I wander alone.

On a journey of discovery
I am the lost.

*****

What are you up to?

I've got three new books I'm currently working on. One is a collection of poems "about" poetry, many of them addressed to American poets I admire, from Whitman to contemporaries. Another is a collection of lyrical prose poems, a kind of thing I haven't written in a long time. The third is another "historical" project, a book about the 20th Century, comprised of one hundred poems, one per year, each dated and in the voice of a historical figure.

Shannon is a long poem about George Shannon, the youngest member of the Corps of Discovery. How did you come across his story?

I have a poem about Meriwether Lewis in my very first book, CAPITALISM, and while researching that poem, 20 years ago, I first encountered George Shannon, who got lost and wandered alone for 16 days, and I thought--that would make a good long poem. Over the ensuing years, I would occasionally tune in to George Shannon's voice, and take down notes about his time on the prairie, but never knew exactly what to make of them. Then I had a semester off from teaching, three years ago, and sat down to really write his story.

How did you decide to write an epic poem? Also, how long did it take to write from idea to final draft?

Once I really focussed on Shannon, it went surprisingly quickly--I wrote the poem in about six or eight weeks, and then revised it for another year. Because I knew the beginning and end of the story--Shannon gets lost, then he gets found--I only had to create the narrative of those sixteen days alone. It becomes an epic poem in the sense that Shannon represents many things in American history and culture, and speaks to us from a time, two hundred years ago, when America was still creating itself, literally and symbolically.

What was the greatest challenge you found in writing this poem?

Just keeping it going. Getting the narrative to work. It was a kind of novelistic struggle--how do you keep the reader interested? How do you create tension, create a voice for Shannon, create a shape for the poem?

You teach at Florida International University. What is the most common mistake you find younger writers making?

Young writers make all kinds of mistakes, but so do not-so-young writers. I prefer the mistakes of younger writers, because they tend to be mistakes of enthusiasm rather than mistakes of excessive caution.

How do you manage your submissions to publications?

I just send out poems to magazines when I feel I have a bunch of finished poems lying around. Sometimes, I might not really have anything for a year or two--as when my energy went into Shannon, a long poem, which I did not really submit to periodicals. Getting published is like going fishing--some days you catch a fish, some days you don't. It might have to do with the bait you are using, or your technique, or where you are casting your line--but there's a lot of luck involved, too.

Who are you currently reading?

I've been reading novels, biographies and history recently, books about Picasso, Matisse, and Chairman Mao, among others.

If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?

Write more poems. Ignore things you can't control--like getting published--and write as much as you possibly can.

*****

* Check out Campbell McGrath's Wikipedia page (don't usually get to say that, huh?) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_McGrath

* You can learn more about Ecco at http://www.harpercollins.com.

*****

Also, if you're a poet or publisher interested in a Poetic Asides interview, then click here to see how we might be able to make that happen.

Poet Interviews TOC (updated June 2009)

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:59:14 GMT

I've been lucky enough to interview several talented poets on the blog. And to make it easier for you to read them all, I've updated my poet interview TOC. There are many more interviews on the way.

* Bill Abbott
* Nin Andrews
* Julianna Baggott
* Sandra Beasley
* Shaindel Beers
* Jericho Brown
* Helene Cardona
* Sage Cohen
* J.P. Dancing Bear
* Sara Diane Doyle
* Denise Duhamel
* Katy Evans-Bush
* Patricia Fargnoli
* John M. Fitzgerald
* Cherryl Floyd-Miller
* Suzanne Frischkorn
* Jeannine Hall Gailey
* Frank Giampietro
* Tom C. Hunley
* Sheema Kalbasi
* John Korn
* Dorianne Laux
* Diane Lockward
* Tom Lombardo
* Denise Low
* Justin Marks
* Joseph Mills
* Valerie Nieman
* Aimee Nezhukumatathil
* Kevin Pilkington
* Susan Rich
* Martha Silano
* Laurel Snyder
* Anne Tardos
* Jillian Weise

Interview With Poet Shaindel Beers

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:24:53 GMT

Some of you dedicated Poetic Asides readers may recognize Shaindel's name as a person who's commented on the blog and even shared advice in previous Poets Helping Poets posts. She's a Facebook pal and an internationally published poet.

Shaindel is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in Eastern Oregon's high desert and serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary (www.contrarymagazine.com). She previously hosted the talk radio poetry show Translated By, which can be found at www.blogtalkradio.com/onword.

She recently released her first full length collection, A Brief History in Time, through Salt Publishing. Here is one of the poems I enjoyed the most:

A Man Walks Into a Bar

He was tall, well-built, blue-eyed,
a guy most girls would want to take to bed.
Then he reached for the beer with his left hand,
revealing the stump of his right.

We could tell the second he knew that we knew.
We'd smile, but the smile wouldn't travel
all the way to our eyes. He'd turn back to the bar,
fold his arm closer so that we could
no longer see

as we rushed off to sling beers for guys
not as good-looking but more whole,
the ones who leered lecherously,
on "Short-Shorts Night"
and left ten dollar tips for two dollar beers

always expecting more, always bitter when we didn't deliver.
The quiet one, we wounded week after week, a guy
any of us would have considered "out of our league,"
"a long shot," if he had been unbroken,

the sad, blond man we were afraid to love.

*****

What are you up to?

Right now, I am grading tons of papers because it is the final week of classes where I teach. Next week is finals week, then a week break, then I teach summer classes. I've managed to get my summer classes scheduled to just Mondays and Tuesdays for six weeks, so I hope to write and read like crazy during the summer. I have a two-book deal with Salt, so I'm going to keep working on the poems for my second book with them, and I need maybe another three to four short stories to round out a short story collection, so I hope to make that happen. My other fantasy is to write a poem a day, starting with where I fell off the wagon during National Poetry Month and then start on prompts from the previous years.

I noticed a few sestinas and a ghazal in your collection, A Brief History of Time. Do you have a favorite poetic form?

I really like sestinas. There's something comforting and scary at the same time about setting up a Word document or a page in a notebook with those six end words all down the page. The rush of all of the possibilities. I want to get better at villanelles, though. Even though there is a villanelle in my collection, I don't think it's as good as the sestinas. I still need practice. And I want to work on other forms, too. So, yes, I do have a favorite, but I need to work on all of it.

You have a confessional voice in your poems. Where do you draw the line between reality and fiction?

I think John Ciardi said it best when he said, "Poetry lies its way to the truth." Most of A Brief History of Time is autobiographical, but sometimes details are changed for the sake of sound or rhythm or meter or to make something a little more dramatic. For instance, in the title poem, I say that my mother was in jail for two counts of attempted murder, but it was attempted manslaughter. I don't know if anyone's going to pick bones about that.

You're the poetry editor of Contrary. As an editor, what are common mistakes you see writers making in their submissions?

The biggest mistake is people sending in things that just aren't ready. It's like the second they finished writing the first draft, they sent it. Sit with the poem for a while, think about it. Go through and make sure each word is the right word, that each word is necessary.

The second thing that happens is that people leave words out or have typos. And sometimes this happens in the most brilliant works of the most brilliant poets, and it's really painful then, because I ask my co-editor, Jeff McMahon, "Can we ask her if she meant, x, y, z?" and then we're deliberating with a poet, when our instinct should be just to put it in the "no" pile. I really think we are surprisingly nice and patient for editors who get thousands of submissions for each issue. Editors shouldn't have to do that; if you're sending it out, it should be flawless, the best work you can produce. There are thousands and thousands of other writers you're competing against out there.

You host a talk radio show, Translated By. What's the most fulfilling aspect of the show?

Sadly, I don't do the radio show any more. I have a teaching load of five courses a quarter, three quarters a year, and then I teach two six-week summer courses for extra money--so seventeen college courses a year. (And I have two part-time jobs on top of that, so I'm usually working seven days a week.) It was really hard to read a book a week to be properly prepared for the show and be emailing writers and publishers constantly to keep the show booked.

The most fulfilling aspect of the show was learning more about writers all over the world. Despite the outcry that Horace Engdahl caused when he called American literature "too insular," there's a lot to what he said. I loved having to read a book (in translation) by a non-English language writer once a week. I learned so much about writers from other cultures and what is going on or has gone on around the world. It was like a global perspectives or world history course every week.

How do you manage your own submissions process?

It's a lot different than it used to be, and I'm trying to figure it all out. I used to have tons of unpublished works, and I would send out everywhere, and then collect all of my rejection slips and a few acceptances. I still use Allison Joseph's Creative Writers Opportunities list (CRWROPPS) and Duotrope's newsletters. Now, I'm in the strange position of nearly everything I've written having been published, and I really need to get to work at producing more writing. Also, I get contacted a lot by editors and publishers asking if I have work for an upcoming issue or sending me invitations for a themed issue or anthology. This, of course, is a double-edged sword. It's really nice to get first consideration, but it really hurts when you get rejected. There's nothing like getting asked to the prom by the starting quarterback and then being stood up.

Who are you currently reading?

If it weren't a FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) violation, I would type the name of the student on the top of my stack right now. I was "sort of" reading Ellen Gilchrist's Nora Jane: A Life in Stories. My husband and I have a tradition of going to Artifacts, a used book store in Hood River, Oregon, when we go camping and fishing at Deschutes River State Park, and buying books to read in the tent each night. So, I read non-student work then. I really like Ellen Gilchrist and secretly wish I was Nora Jane. I also have a book review that is overdue (please forgive me, Jeff) of C. E. Chaffin's Unexpected Light. I've really admired Chaffin's work in the past, and I can't wait to get into the book after all of this grading is behind me.

Then, I have a giant stack of friends' (a mixture of online and in-person) books to read--Kyle Minor, Christopher Coake, Idra Novey, Kim Barnes, Patricia Smith. Just loads and loads of summer reading to catch up on.

If you could share only one piece of advice with fellow poets, what would it be?

Read and read and read. Read writers you admire; dip into bad writers occasionally to reassure yourself that you're not one. Read poetry, read fiction, read nonfiction about things you'd like to write poetry about. Just read.

*****

* You can try and win a copy of Shaindel's book from Goodreads.com at http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6135468.A_Brief_History_of_Time. Winners will be chosen June 29.

* She also invites poets to hunt her down and friend her on Facebook.

* And she has an author site at Red Room as well: www.redroom.com/author/shaindel-rebekah-beers.

* Plus, more info on her book is available at Salt Publishing's website www.saltpublishing.com.

*****

If you're a poet or poetry publisher and want hooked up with a Poetic Asides interview, then click here to see how you might be able to make that happen.

Interview With Poet Frank Giampietro

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:53:54 GMT

I first came across Frank Giampietro's name during an interview with Julianna Baggott last year. Since then, I just kept running into either his name or the title of his collection, Begin Anywhere. Finally, I decided to ask him for an interview (he's a Facebook friend--see the power of social networking?).

One of the things I personally love about this collection is that it constantly surprised me. Every time I thought I was going down a predictable road--one I didn't care to go down--the poem would take interesting side streets to get to our destination, which may or may not have been where I thought we were going originally. Eventually, I quit trying to predict our destination. Instead, I just let myself enjoy the ride.

Here's one of my favorite poems of the collection:

Juice

I'd like to begin with my addiction to heroin,
though I never shot it, I only sniffed it.
(Snorted is so, what? Crass?)
Once after seven years without it, I talked
to an Italian ex-junkie who was still smoking hash.
Because she shot it,
she claimed that she was more addicted to it.
Instead of admitting she was right, I went on
about the purity of American heroin
while she repeated no, no, no emphatically.
I found her sexy in a big-boned
Elizabeth Bishop sort of way.
If I were Elizabeth Bishop,
with my history of addiction,
I would have to write a villanelle
like "One Art,"
but my refrains would be
A1: I shared crack with a pregnant Dominican woman
A2: at the top of a five-flight walk-up on 109th Street in Harlem.
They say you can let the arms
of the repeating lines
wrap themselves around you
for comfort. It's a great form for subjects
that might otherwise be a threat.
I wish I could say that my best poems
are written when I'm afraid. Sometimes
when my four-year-old wakes up, he's afraid.
The first words out of his mouth are
I want some juice. Now I sleep with him,
and I wake up to the request
nearly every day. Honestly, there's no better way
to slip from my dreams. I worry I won't sleep at all
when he kicks me out of his bed.
When I sniffed heroin, whole parts of my body
would go completely numb as I slept.
One morning I woke unable to move either arm,
but after a minute or two, the feeling came back. It's not
that I'm afraid to write about addiction--it's just
that this is nothing like that.

*****

What are you up to?

This summer I'm working on a second book while teaching creative writing to undergraduates here at Florida State University. Otherwise I'm making video poems I call "voems" (very original, right?) and posting them to YouTube. You can see two of them here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Wn_i0PezM.

Your website lafovea.org is rather interesting in how poets become nerves that connect to each other. Could you speak a little about how the site works and what the inspiration was behind the site?

One day after hearing the usual grousing about how nepotistic the publishing world is (an idea that doesn't hold much water, by the way), I had an idea to use nepotism productively, interestingly, as an alternative to publishing in the usual submission rejection sort of way. I thought why not have an internet site that publishes poems by invitation exclusively. And then I thought about how to do that and allow the largest variety of voices to be heard. I envisioned teachers inviting students and students inviting teachers. I also thought and hoped La Fovea might get poets from outside academia too. So I came up with the idea of publishing poetry nerves, nerves all extending from a giant poetry eyeball. I started with twelve poets with very different writing styles, all of whom I know and admire, all of them gathered around the eyeball on the homepage, and had them post two poems. Then they had to invite at least one poet. That poet then invited a poet and so on. We now have over 160 contributors. It's really working well and has been a lot of fun to see grow.

Your poems deal with topics such as being a father and husband. You are both a husband and father in real life. So, where do you draw the line between reality and fiction in your poems?

I guess I don't, in my poems that is. For instance, I have a poem about my son shooting me with an arrow. And knock on wood, he hasn't shot me with an arrow yet. But we have played with a bow and arrow, and he has scared the bejesus out of me a time or two pointing the arrow inadvertently at me or his sister or the cat. That's where I get the poems from, the possibilities for drama in real life rather than the life itself. Life itself is usually dull, as far as I can tell (maybe because I have no "inner resources").

Begin Anywhere is broken into two sections. How did you decide to organize the poems in this collection?

I had a lot of help from my editor at Alice James Books, April Ossamann. She showed me some ways of organizing the book that I just couldn't see on my own.

Your poetry has been published in several literary journals. Do you have a method for handling your submissions?

I send in spurts, usually, and then wait for the rejections to come in. One day recently I got three in the mail at once. I think that might be a record.

When do you know a poem is finished?

After I've sat with it a week or two and shown it to one of my trusty couple of readers and gotten his or her feedback, that's when I know it's ready to send out. Finished is another story. I'm more of a poem abandoner than a finisher. I never feel like my poems are finished.

If you could begin anywhere, where would you begin?

Ha, ha, very funny. I like the 12-step program notion that one can begin one's day over at any time during the day. One can just say okay enough. Let's begin this day again. I do this with my kids sometimes when they are acting up. If things are getting hairy at the dinner table one of us will say "stop, let's start our day over." And then we have a little good morning ritual and then we start again. But even on my own, without the kids, I begin my day over lots of times as a way to keep my head on straight and my attitude and outlook rosy.

Who (or what) are you currently reading?

Right now I'm reading Joel Brouwer's new book "And So." It's really amazing. He's a poetry dude. I'm also reading Anna Karenina on my Kindle iPhone application. I have a house full of books and love paper books just like the next poet, but I have to say it's great reading on my phone because the phone is so much easier to hold than a book. Plus, since I always have my phone, I always have my book and can read while in line at the post office mailing my soon to be rejected submissions.

If you could offer only one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

Hmmmm, I like to take advice a lot more than give it. If I could take one piece of advice, I would like to be told to be more satisfied with things exactly the way they are. That's what I need to do, how I need to be.

*****

To learn more about Frank Giampietro and his collection, Begin Anywhere, go to his publisher's website at http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/

Also, check out his online literary journal at http://lafovea.org/.

Or read "Death by My Son" featured on Poetry Daily (and the one he references in the interview above) at: http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14198

*****

If you're a poet, editor, publisher, etc., interested in an interview on Poetic Asides, then click here to learn how to possibly make that happen.

Interview With Poet Justin Marks

Tue, 12 May 2009 02:45:07 GMT

Justin Marks' full-length collection of poems, A Million in Prizes, was recently released by New Issues Poetry & Prose after winning the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize. His latest chapbook is Voir Dire (Rope-a-Dope Press), and he's the founder and editor of Kitchen Press Chapbooks.

I enjoyed reading both A Million in Prizes and Voir Dire, which is a semi-long poem. Here's one of my favorites from A Million in Prizes:

Matter of Fact

I wanted to create the ocean, the sky,
the intricate structure of a leaf

and thought by now
I'd have come close.

What joy I have in knowing
creation of that sort

doesn't exist.
The world has little

use for me.
Its glare blinds.

How glad I am
for the orbit I inhabit.

A planet to the sun.

*****

What are you up to?

Enjoying being a new dad. Working. Doing some writing here and there. Lining up readings for the spring and fall.

An entire section of your collection A Million in Prizes is one long poem: [Summer insular]. How is writing a long poem different from writing shorter poems?

Writing a long poem, for me, is more comforting than working on shorter poems. Something about knowing I have a large space to work in puts me in a good place emotionally. I mean, I love writing shorter poems, but they generally don't take as long to write and if I don't have anything else I'm working on, I'll start to get real anxious. But lately my short poems are all part of a larger vision/conceptual framework, a book or chapbook, so even when I'm done with an individual poem I know I have a lot more to work on in terms of completing that particular manuscript. It makes me feel more like I'm working on sections of a long poem instead of isolated one night stands, as Spicer called them.

The end of your collection is packed with prose poems. What do you like about the prose poem?

Those poems were a real turning point in my writing. I could sense that I wouldn't be writing too many more poems like the ones from the first section. Not because I didn't like them. It was just that...I don't know...the straight-up, individual lyric poem was starting to feel limiting to me. I was and am proud of the work that’s in the first section of my book, and absolutely stand by it, but in terms of my development it was just time to move on. One of the things a book is to me is in some ways a chart of a person’s development/growth as a writer during the time in which the book was written.

To try and enable that growth for myself I decided that I needed to focus on not caring about the end result and (as much as I possibly could) turn off my inner-critic and just write. One way I was able to make that happen was to not worry about line breaks any more. At the same time, I found myself thinking more in sentences than lines—or maybe more accurately: Thinking about sentences as lines. So that was one thing I liked about prose poems. I was able to sort of pack a lot in and move about in a more relaxed manner than if I were trying to write lineated poems.

Since then I've returned to prose a good bit. A new chapbook manuscript I'm finishing up is all prose. What I hope will be my next book is a series of sonnets, but even with those I keep trying to work prose lines in there somehow to kind of break things up and build some variety into the manuscript.

The poems in A Million in Prizes are all first person narratives. Where do you draw the line between reality and fiction in your poems? Also, what do you like about writing in a confessional voice?

I don't think writing in the first person makes one confessional. My poems in this book—and in general—explore the lyric "I", certainly, but that's totally different than being confessional. I'm not confessing anything. Besides, there are so many problems with that term, even as it has been/is applied to poets like Lowell and Plath and that whole "confessional" crowd—it doesn't feel useful to me.

One of the things I try to do in my work is get an entire self (if such a thing exists) down on the page, so I don't really draw lines between fiction and reality. It's all fiction. And reality. I take from my life whatever is necessary for my work to progress/evolve/change. It potentially gets tricky when I start writing about other people from my life, but so far no one has objected or asked me to not write about them. If they did, though, I'd have to honor that.

Your collection won the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize, and you're the founder and editor of Kitchen Press Chapbooks. What do you think makes a good collection?

I think about this a lot, and every time I start to approach a conclusion I'm reminded of some book I like that breaks the rules surrounding whatever conclusions I'm approaching. I guess, on a basic level, I think a good collection is one in which the poems become something more than individual poems that are somehow similar in feel and arranged together to make a nice flow. The poems in a good collection are in conversation with each other and form something greater than their parts.

But that definition, for me, is always changing. Over the last few years I've become way more invested in books that are projects or series/serial as opposed to more traditional collections, books that are more akin to Spicer's idea of the serial poem, or are a book length poem, etc. One of my favorite contemporary books is Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely. The subtitle is An American Lyric. I don't know what that means, or how one might define it except to say, read the book. It's prose, but I'm not sure if it's prose poems. Maybe it's a lyric essay or memoir of some sort. It doesn't really matter. Martha Ronk's Vertigo is another book I enjoy immensely that I think is a little limiting to just call a collection of poems (though it does have individual poems). It's more like a series or cycle of poems.

It’s one of the qualities I look for when I read manuscripts for Kitchen Press. Take Hit Wave, by Jon Leon. I don't know if you've read it, but I'm not really sure what it is: a collection of prose poems? A lyric novella? I could only put it under the rather general category of anti-poetic. And writing I love.

But then there's Old With You, by Lily Brown. I don't think anyone would argue that that isn't your basic collection of somewhat thematically linked, individual poems. But I love that book too.

So I guess what I'm saying is: There are basic qualities that I think make a good collection, but I also really dig work that makes questions just what a collection of poems is/can be. (As an aside, Tarpaulin Sky Press is deeply invested in putting out work that others might not consider to be "poetry.")

Your bio mentions an infant son and daughter. Have they impacted your writing in any way?

They impacted my writing before they were even conceived. I wrote Voir Dire around the time my wife and I were getting serious about trying to get pregnant. There are lots of references to babies in that mini-chapbook. There are also a lot of babies in the two manuscripts I've been working on throughout my wife's pregnancy and since the birth of our son and daughter. In a sense, it's all kind of topical. I never mentioned babies in my work until we started trying to have one/had them. I mean, I'm not writing about my babies as individual people per-se. I don't really write "about" specific people or subjects. Though I suppose there are poems in A Million in Prizes that you could argue are "about" specific subjects. Generally, though, it's not my thing. Anyway. That I'm mentioning babies at all, to me, means my babies have had a significant impact on my writing.

You work as a copywriter. How do the demands of writing copy differ from writing poetry? Also, are there similarities?

Marketing copy has to be concise and to the point, say as much as possible with as few words as possible, and it absolutely has to get and maintain the reader’s attention, even if it is only for a few moments and all you're ultimately saying is "Buy Now". Poetry is like that. (Though there are certainly worthwhile poetries out there that are not at all concerned with the whole maximum-impact-with-minimum-words model.) But I think the most significant similarity is that marketing copy is pretty conceptual. You have to think about all the ways what you're saying can be interpreted and if that fits in with what you want people to take away. For me, with poetry, it's not that I necessarily have a specific idea of what I want people to take away, but I definitely put a lot of time into thinking about how any random stranger out in the world could interpret my writing. In that sense, being a copywriter has made me a much more conscious and aware (I guess "better") poet than if I were in some other profession.

This feels even more true to me when I think about the connections between putting together a marketing campaign and writing a book, or even an extended project that spans across many individual books. You have to really be aware of how each part interacts with the other, whether it's individual ads in a campaign or poems in a book (whether that book be a more traditional collection of individual poems or something more extended/conceptual).

There's also the fact that corporate and marketing lingo is some of the weirdest, most mind-blowing shit I've ever heard. Total goldmine.

But the biggest difference between copywriting and poetry, for me, is that I often feel restricted when writing copy. I may come up with an idea or a line, but so many people above me will have their feedback that I have to find a way to incorporate, and there's also the whole staying on brand and within the voice aspect as well. And that's cool. But poetry, for me, is in large part about freedom. I really don't have anything to lose or gain career-wise with poetry so I feel generally free to do whatever I want. Of course that feeling winds up compromised by various factors and circumstances, as it must, but I'd like to think that that sense of freedom that I try to start from still remains somehow at the core of my poetry.

Who have you been reading recently?

Joe Massey, Eric Baus, Rodrigo Toscano, Jack Spicer, Frank Stanford, Barbara Guest,

Mathias Svalina, Aase Berg, Zach Schomburg, Harper’s Magazine, Wired Magazine, the most recent issue of the Agricultural Reader.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

I've been given such large heaps of bad advice over the years, I'm hesitant to offer any of my own. So maybe my advice should be, “don’t take any advice.” Then again, I've also gotten some good advice that has often helped sustain me: Trust yourself. Don't let anyone or thing stop you. Be willing to change. Persevere. Stuff like that. That’s my advice.

*****

Check out A Million in Prizes and New Issues Poetry & Prose at www.wmich.edu/newissues.

Check out Voir Dire and Rope-a-Dope Press at http://rope-a-dope-press.blogspot.com.

Check out Justin Marks at his blog: http://justinanselmarks.blogspot.com/.

*****

Are you a publisher or poet interested in a Poetic Asides interview? Then, click here for more details on how to be considered for one.

Interview With Poet Laurel Snyder

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:54:48 GMT

Interesting (maybe only to me) story: This interview with Laurel Snyder came about after Laurel responded to one of my "tweets" on Twitter. (By the way, you can follow me there at http://twitter.com/robertleebrewer.) Yes, social networking really can benefit all writers--even (or maybe especially) poets.

In 2007, No Tell Books published Laurel Snyder's collection, The Myth of the Simple Machines. No stranger to publishing, Laurel has published several books with her recent titles for children, including Inside the Slidy Diner (Tricycle Press).

Here's one of my favorite poems from The Myth of the Simple Machines:

The Truth

Listen. My grandmother
died and we burned her

up in a fire but when we
went to dump her ashes
in water--because water
is cool and makes us feel

better--she refused to be
put under. She floated

until my uncle held her down.
He forced her--to swallow the
end and the water to swallow
her body. Then we drove

away quick. Didn't stare
too long at the spot. She was

horrible, my grandmother,
and that's the truth, though
my uncle pretended. "She
was a good old girl, just

the dog done lost her bite."
But no. "But no she

never did," we told him.
If only she had. The witch.
There she was--rising, biting
at us from the very end.

Trying to claw her way to
beyond her welcome, which

died about the time she
began. It's a terrible thing--
hatred. Of family, the dead,
water that isn't heavy enough

to pull things down and keep them.
"I love you," I said to her as she died.

"Yes, but you love lots of people,"
she growled back faintly.
"Not enough," I should've told
her then, "nowhere near."

*****

What are you currently up to?

Tonight? I'm playing a desperate game of catch-up with several little deadlines, eating half a roast beef sandwich, listening for the kids to wake up screaming (which they do EVERY night), and then, at last, going to bed with a copy of Searching for Mercy Street, which is awesome, and totally messing with my head.

You write poetry and children's books. So when you start writing, how do you know you're working on a poem or a children's book?

Hmm. In the beginning, I didn't. Back when I started writing for kids, the genres blended together a lot. Prose poems would become picture books, and stories would turn into poems. Most of them messy and unacceptable to everyone. Nowadays, I have a clearer sense for what I can actually sell as a book for kids. And that tends to limit some of what I'm doing (though I try not to let it). But there's still some back and forth, and lines I snip from my novels often make their way into my poems.

Do you consider yourself a children's book writer who writes poetry, or a poet who writes children's books?

This is a hard question for me right now. Inside myself, I'm a poet. I always have been, pretty much. I think in lines, in forms, and with the kind of attraction to language that we call poetry. But as time goes by, and I do more and more books that aren't poetry, it only makes sense that others will see the poetry as secondary. I haven't stopped writing poems, but a book of poems is a lot harder to sell than anything else in the world. I'm not even sending out my current manuscript.

There's a storytelling element to your poems. Did you grow up around stories?

I think everyone grows up around stories. But I absolutely did, and more than that, I grew up around fables. I'm very interested in mythology, allegory, fairy tale. The idea of narrative as inherently more. I spent a lot of college reading Eastern European poetry, and I think that reinforced my sense of fable as poetry.

How do you handle the submission process?

I don't do a very good job of it lately. I just submitted a poem to an anthology this month, because it was something that I desperately wanted to be part of. But I no longer take a terribly organized aproach to submissions. Partly because my current manuscript is a lot of tiny poems, and they don't work well as stand-alones. So I'm kind of building up the steam to send the book out as a whole. In general though, I try really hard not to submit to magazines I don't actually read. Which means, increasingly, that I submit to online magazines.

What do you feel makes a great poem?

I think a really great poem has two things--a veneer of accesibility (whether narrative structure, playful language, an emotional hook, a huge image, whatever). Something a reader can grab onto. Something that functions as an entry point. And then the requirement for a second/ third/fourth/ fifth read. I'm not interested in work that's only pleasurable or evocative or lyrical. But I also have very little time for work that doesn't grab me.

Who have you been reading recently?

I've been going back to Sexton and Plath, neither of whom (I'm embarassed to say) I've ever read seriously . I loved them in high school, and sort of dismissed them after, BECAUSE I'd loved them in high school. Isn't that silly? As a woman and mother and someone interested in myth and storytelling, this seems insane.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

Lighten up. The things that matter--like the poems themselves, and the community you build around yourself to support this crazy thing you do--aren't going anywhere just because you don't win a contest or get into a certain magazine or a certain university job. I think the academic world we've pushed poetry into is problematic, and the rewards are easily quantifiable, and that brings a heavyness to the business of writing. Which limits what we write about and how we write. Which is sad. When I had my kids, and stopped teaching adjunct, I kind of gave up on all of that, and I've been happier ever since. Though I do feel like a goof at AWP, with no affiliation to claim. But what can I do--it's a good party!

*****

You can learn more about Laurel Snyder at http://laurelsnyder.com/.

Also, you can check out her publisher, No Tell Books, at http://www.notellbooks.org/.

And, while researching Laurel, I found this interview by my co-worker/boss, Alice Pope at her CWIM blog: http://cwim.blogspot.com/2009/01/blogger-of-week-laurel-snyder.html

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in an interview, check this out.

Interview With Poet Sage Cohen

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:09:52 GMT

Sage Cohen is the author of Writer's Digest Books' most recent poetry title, Writing the Life Poetic. She's also the author of Like the Heart, the World (Queen of Wands Press). She's taught poetry at universities, hospitals and writing conferences as well as online. As principal of Sage Communications, Cohen writes the words that connect businesses with the people they want to reach.

Though I admit I'm usually suspicious of self-published titles (Queen of Wands Press is Sage's own press, named after one of the poems in the collection), both Tammy and myself found her collection Like the Heart, the World to be a great read. Here's one of my favorites:

The Irony of the Small Horn

Paul says the Great American Music Hall
should be called The Great European Music Hall.

Its gold flourishes and imperial balcony feel more
like something you'd yearn for from across the ocean.

Nothing is named right in this world.
I don't know what to call Paul's body against mine.

Dancing, maybe, but that's not enough.
It's more like a question before it is born

gathering force among the margins
of what is already known or believed.

Paul has his hand on my stomach where my shirt rides up
and I press into the beat coming through his chest.

My hips rotate with the room. Singular surrenders to plural.
Sweat and smoke and beer and bodies pulse in the darkness.

The music is a fire. Dancing is the flame.
We all depend on each other to burn.

Paul points out the enormous man playing the tiny trumpet.
All the big guys have small horns, we agree.

This poem was supposed to be about that. About the trumpet,
because that was how Paul and I planned it.

But nothing ever turns out the way you think it will.
The music ends, and then it's time to go home.

*****

What are you up to?

National Poetry Month has been great fun over here. I've launched my Writing the Life Poetic book tour by speaking at a few chapters of Willamette Writers and appearing on a variety of writing blogs throughout the month. It's week five of my six-week Poetry for the People online class, and my students have been dazzling me with their dedication and fine poems. My full-time "day job" of marketing communications consultant is clipping right along, and I've been dedicating every scrap of free time to your Poem-A-Day Challenge. Because my son Theo has been waking up every two hours or so throughout the night for the past seven months, I'm in a perpetual sleep-deprivation daze that I've decided to embrace as a poetic state of mind.

Like the Heart, the World is a self-published title. Why did you choose this route of publication?

Before deciding to self publish, I spent about a year sending my manuscript out to publication contests. It placed as finalist or semi-finalist four times, which was exciting. That was enough validation for me...I didn't want to spend any more time waiting for someone to choose my book for publication. I felt a sense of urgency to have that body of work in the world, and to have it look and feel exactly the way I wanted. I've spent years creating marketing communications materials for clients, and I always enjoy the opportunity to design and produce my own pieces. So I hired my favorite illustrator/designer to layout the book and create the cover, and within a few months, had a finished product in my hands.

What do you think is the most rewarding part of self-publishing your collection? What do you consider the most challenging?

It was very empowering deciding that my book was ready to be born, and then making it happen. The poems in Like the Heart, the World span more than 15 years and reflect time periods and thematic cycles in my life that felt complete. With this publication, I feel that they've been well honored, which gives me more breathing room to embrace the poems of this life chapter. There really haven't been any challenges or regrets.

I hope that my experience will remind other poets who feel helpless about the poetry publishing waiting process that they have options. We can decide when our manuscripts are ready to go forth into the world as books, and we can do that however we like...the traditionally prescribed way or our own way.

You've taught poetry at universities, hospitals, and writing conferences. What's the most common question you receive? What's your answer?

While the questions take many different forms, what people studying poetry seem to universally need is permission to write poems--and encouragement about their capacity to do so. I see my role as a mirror...I reflect back to my students what is powerful and true in what they are doing so they can have more fun and be more successful doing it.

Why should a poet buy a copy of Writing the Life Poetic?

The craft of poetry has been well documented in a variety of books that offer a valuable service to serious writers striving to become competent poets. Now it’s time for a poetry book that does more than lecture from the front of the classroom. Writing the Life Poetic was written to be a contagiously fun adventure in writing. Through an entertaining mix of insights, exercises, expert guidance and encouragement, I hope to get readers excited about the possibilities of poetry––and engaged in a creative practice. Leonard Cohen says: "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash." My goal is that Writing the Life Poetic be the flame fueling the life well lived.

Practicing poets, aspiring poets, and teachers of writing in a variety of settings can use Writing the Life Poetic to write, read, and enjoy poems. Both practical and inspirational, it will leave readers with a greater appreciation for the poetry they read and a greater sense of possibility for the poetry they write.

Like the Heart, the World is broken into three sections (New York, San Francisco, and Portland). How important is location to your writing?

I wouldn't say that location is important to my writing, per se, but that the writing processes that I chose in each of the cities I lived seemed to yield a kind of poetry that resonated with that particular place. In New York, I walked everywhere and carried a small, handheld tape recorder where I whispered my little slivers of street-sightings and trash tracings. Then I'd transcribe these observations into the computer later and write from there. In San Francisco, I had a regular rhythm of freewriting (in longhand, in notebooks) in cafes, often while listening to live acoustic music. These days, I have somewhat of a hybrid of my previous two practices. I carry 3x5" index cards everywhere and write down everything that comes—usually while hiking in a rainforest or taking a bath. As a result, the New York poems often echo urban alienation and are laced with street grit. The San Francisco poems are often thematically and craft-wise a little looser and more musical and the Portland poems feel to me watery and deeply green.

Do you have a favorite poetic form?

I'm fascinated by haiku. This form represents to me the quintessential art of compression that poetry asks of us: to reveal a panoramic truth in a thin, velum layer of words.

Who are you currently reading?

Tess Gallagher, Paulann Petersen, Mari L'Esperance, Jack Gilbert, Jericho Brown, Jay Leeming.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to your fellow poets, what would it be?

Welcome what comes. The poems choosing you are the ones that need to be written. Don't judge them or worry if they're "important" enough. Your poems will teach you who you are as a poet and a person. Just follow the golden thread and let them write you.

*****

If you wish to learn more about Sage Cohen, check out her website at www.sagesaidso.com.

Or you can stop by her blog at www.writingthelifepoetic.typepad.com.

*****

Are you a poet or poetry publisher interested in seeing yourself (or your authors) interviewed here on Poetic Asides? Well, figure out how to get the ball rolling on that by clicking here.

*****

Looking for more poetry information?

Check out our poetry titles (on sale in the month of April) HERE.
Read the most recent WritersDigest.com poetry-related articles HERE.
View several poetic forms HERE.
See where poetry is happening HERE.

Interview With Poet Katy Evans-Bush

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:08:58 GMT

Since I know this interview is a little on the long side (which is a good thing), I won't spend too much time introducting Katy Evans-Bush, who recently released her first collection of poetry Me and the Dead through Salt Publishing. She also maintains the very popular literary blog Baroque in Hackney.

As I've come to expect from titles published by Salt, Me and the Dead was a very enjoyable read. Here's one of my favorite poems:

Or Something

You told me the universe is doing something.
I forget what: expanding or flapping
in the wind or something--no matter which,
it's only one infinitely possible universe.
It's only ours and imperfect anyway.
Somewhere somebody else's universe
is either expanding, its particles drawing strangely
away from one another as if in horror but still,
I suppose, part of the pack--
or even shrinking (did we consider that?)
which would be caused by the atoms huddling
close for warmth or comfort
against that flapping wind or something;
rubbing together, the friction,
the blanket of static, creating our electric
storms and other interesting diversions.
The universes are, in their multitudes,
unending and also infinitesimal. Some say
they're parallel while others talk of layering.
Oh, the layered universes--I picture them
piled high like feather beds, the feathers inside them
brushing across each other or something.

*****

What are you up to?

Right now? My boyfriend's daughter just took me out for a slap-up lunch (with cheesecake) for my birthday! She's nearly 15 and she earned the money herself, so it was a huge treat.

Other than that, I'm reading up on Oscar Wilde and Henry James for a long poem called (so far) Speculation and Conjecture. It's half done, and I'm thrilled that it's going to be published in January as a pamphlet by Rack Press in Wales.

Then there's the next collection from Salt; they'd like a manuscript by the end of the year.

Then there's this novel idea.

And I'm a bit behind on essays and reviews promised.

Then there's work, kids, laundry, the kitchen…

You maintain a very popular blog at http://www.baroqueinhackney.wordpress.com. How do you feel poets can benefit from having a blog? Also, do you feel all poets should have a blog?

Well… there are maybe three ways in which a poet can benefit from having a blog, but spending time writing blog posts instead of poems probably isn't one of them!

It's a great way to establish a web presence and build a readership. BUT, it is incredibly time-consuming. Really, you need to be doing it for its own sake. You need to have something to say, and be unafraid of saying it. (Yes: I have had fear. Mainly when you realise beyond the shadow of a doubt that the poet you wrote that thing about has just read your blog. It's a great lesson in circumspection. I'd apologise here but that would mean admitting I said it in the first place.)

You also have to be interesting, so that people will come back and read you. This may seem obvious! But there are some very boring blogs out there and they reek of the devoir. (Of course, there are also lots of great ones.) Maybe it's just about looking as if you're interested in things. Humour helps, but deep thinking and being interested go a long way.

Mine is only partially a poetry blog. I say it's about all the same stuff as poetry, which of course includes poetry; but I write about anything. I maintain multiple blog identities: poetry, local neighbourhood, arts & culture, home life anecdotes, certain political issues, and grammar/copy-editing etc.

A blog is a great way to lay out your stall – if you have one to lay out: this is the "having something to say" caveat. You can use your blog to position yourself, identify and deepen your aesthetic (or other) stance, work up material even. You can establish your credentials as someone who can, for example, write reviews; editors might take you more seriously because they can see you are seriously engaged in the cultural dialogue. But this will only work if you really are engaged…

And you have to love your blog. You need to work long and hard at internet-networking, registering on blog directories, reading other blogs and commenting, building up a blogroll you can stand by, getting to know the landscape, working out RSS feeds… It all takes time. I don't want to put anyone off, but I really don't think it is for absolutely everyone and no one should feel they have to write a blog. There are other things you can do to raise profile. If you're just doing it to get a web presence you'll resent it. And if you don't do all that, you won't get the readers anyway so it won't do so much for your web presence. Also: it's a long haul. I've built up my reader base over nearly three years.

The third benefit, of course, is your readers. Mine are wonderful. I'm always amazed by the great comments they leave. Such interesting people; I really think I have the best readers in the world. I love them. And I'd never have had them without writing my blog!

Some of them tell me they've even bought Me and the Dead…

You have lived in both the United States and United Kingdom. Do you notice any differences in the voices coming out of either country?

Well, there's a massive difference! Just as there is in daily conversation, TV, pop music, etc. As Oscar Wilde famously said, two countries divided by a common language. But then, there is a lot of overlap, as demonstrated in crossovers in all those areas.

The UK "voice" is much more wry, ironic, mocking or self-mocking. There's more use of humour. Wit, word play, punning (even the serious papers here have punning headlines as the standard), double entendre – and there is much more metrical rhyming poetry from people who don't consider themselves "formalists." The political divide between "free verse" and "formalist poetry" doesn't exist in the UK. (I think it is a political, not an aesthetic, one; and it's exacerbated now by the fact that a lot of poets write free verse because it's all they know how to do.) Glyn Maxwell is an example of an English poet who writes in form, who isn't a "formalist" poet in the political sense, who has crossed over (as it were) to the USA. Most poets here use rhyme, sometimes, and metre, sometimes, and think nothing of it.

There is a sort of earnestness in the US which does spill, to ill effect, I think, into poetry. It doesn't do in the UK ever to look as if you care too much about something. But then, the UK can suffer from a surfeit of politeness and anecdotalism. You want sweep, too, and America certainly has that.

I love the multiplicity of experience and the opening-out of the more pronounced Modernist influence. I love DA Powell, and Frederick Seidel, for example. As different as they are; they both use words and cadences in really invigorating ways.

My favourite poets come from both sides of the Atlantic; I think either without the other would be much the poorer.

Me and the Dead is your first full-length collection of poetry. How long did it take to get this collection together?

In one sense you could say my whole life, as I've always read, and written, poetry. But I think the oldest poem in there goes back to maybe 2001, maybe 2000, so in that sense it took seven or eight years. The next book won't take nearly so long – partly because there were poems that didn't fit in the first book, and partly because I think I'm on more of a roll these days than I was in 2001 – or, clearly, before. At that stage I was finding my feet in terms of what and how I wanted to write. The fact that the first poem in the book is from 2001 must mean that that's when I started to find my feet.

Were you surprised by anything during the publication process after your manuscript was accepted?

Not really: as I was new to it I had few preconceptions. Also, Salt is a "small" indie press (though they publish many more poetry books than the "big" established ones), so I knew the rules might be different from what you hear about the big publishers. The main surprise I suppose was how closely they worked with me on things like the cover.

What do you think makes a good collection?

Good poems?

Seriously! People talk a lot about narrative arc and all that, and I think it doesn't matter. Why be so prescriptive? Any good book will have engagement with the world. Something to say. Depth, or truth. Either variety or a single idea used well, and fruitfully. Seriousness of purpose – even Ogden Nash had that. It will do what it does, and do it well. It will be surprising and then inevitable, but still surprising.

What is your favorite poetic form?

I don't think I really think in terms of "forms" as much as structure, or the over-arching idea of form. I write a lot of blank – or blankish – verse. And I am very attracted to sonnets, I love the dialectical structure. But I recently wrote something that feels to me like a sonnet and it has thirty dimeter lines, so don't consider me the expert please.

I think "form" is a word we don't really use correctly, anyway. EVERYTHING has form, unless it is "without form and void," like an egg white. I'm not remotely interested in reading a poem like an egg white.

Whatever the rules, whether the poet made them up or even became conscious of them, whichever bits he or she has pulled from the prosodic toolbox, every successful poem must have some sort of structure or form – something the poet decided he or she was trying to do with that poem. You know, a poem that uses only every third letter of the alphabet and has three spaces between each letter has a form.

High Modernism has form. The higher, the higher.

Language poetry and flarf don't interest me overly. Pure chance is just random and not interesting to me. The human brain is designed to seek, and make, and discern, pattern: even when there is no pattern we try to find it. And IQ tests, what they test is our ability to make pattern. Sure, there is value in being able to cope with the unexpected, but the definition of coping would probably be to make it useful in some way: i.e., to find meaning. If something has no meaning it isn't interesting.

And so on. I'm very open about what I enjoy reading, but I'm utterly attached to the idea of meaning.

Who are you currently reading?

James Merrill: I've recently been rereading his Ouija board epic The Changing Light at Sandover, which I always find very beautiful, weird and fruitful. Very funny, and haunting, and deep.

Also Mick Imlah's astonishing and rich The Lost Leader, which has added poignancy since his early death in January; I've particularly been enjoying the final section, Afterlives of the Poets – and it's only in writing it here that I realise it may be on a theme with the Ouija board romance!

I'm just about to write an essay for the Contemporary Poetry Review about Michael Donaghy's Collected Poems and his prose, The Shape of the Dance; so I've naturally been reading those, too.

Then there's Rita Dove's fascinating new book, Sonata Mullatica, featuring a mixed-race 18th century virtuoso and Beethoven, which just arrived in the post… and Roddy Lumsden's new collection, Third Wish Wasted, which is just out… and a young Hungarian poet called Ágnes Lehószky…

Also I memorised one of Shakespeare's sonnets the other week, and loved it. I said it for days. Lovely shapes in the mouth.

And then there's this book about Henry James and Oscar Wilde…

And, er, Twitter…

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to your fellow poets, what would it be?

I'd say, with Henry James: "try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost."

*****

You can read Katy's blog at http://www.baroqueinhackney.wordpress.com.

Or visit her publisher at www.saltpublishing.com.

*****

Are you a published poet or poetry publisher interested in having an interview featured on this blog? Click here to learn how we might be able to make that happen.

*****

Looking for more poetry information?

Check out our poetry titles (on sale in the month of April) HERE.
Read the most recent WritersDigest.com poetry-related articles HERE.
View several poetic forms HERE.
See where poetry is happening HERE.

Interview with poet Cherryl Floyd-Miller

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:42:01 GMT

Earlier this year, Tammy and I took Baby Will with us to his first poetry event, a reading by Cherryl Floyd-Miller at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur, Georgia. Sadly, Wordsmiths has since closed, but Cherryl was nice enough to be interviewed for the Poetic Asides blog.

Her most recent collection of poems, Exquisite Heats, was published in 2008 by Salt Publishing. Cherryl is a native of the Carolinas and has published two other poetry collections: Utterance: A Museology of Kin and Chops. In addition to poetry, Cherryl is also a playwright and fiber artist.

Here's a favorite poem of mine from Exquisite Heats:

Voodoo Chicken

Gots me hanker. Gots me squall, peeping tall-Tom
at your lovely, in your throat, and the itch,
hellcat itch, of it rides me like a witch
into the nights, those crafty nights, no calm
will come. You just a mule teeth puppet show.
Stop and go. Chickenhearted to the core,
you say don't cross the line or crack the door.
How sweetmeat, milk. How navy black. How crow.

But love has stayed and love is made, is all
is with, for. We almost did, just about,
said we (nohow) wouldn't (nungh-ungh) fall.
This moot jinx so far in, it's inside out.
We say we won't. But reckon do. Yak. Stall
for if. Wait for good-good. Gut in. Ass out.

*****

What are you up to?

I am helping a friend build a strong healthcare firm, writing lots of persona poems, finding very interesting ways of writing verse plays and verse narrative ... and (ah, yes) -- quilting. I am truly enjoying this "season" of myself.

You live in the U.S., but your publisher for Exquisite Heats is based in the United Kingdom. How did you go about publishing this collection?

I will have to give credit for my publication through Salt ... to Salt. Chris Hamilton-Emery is an amazing and supportive publisher. He takes the risks others won't take, says the things others won't say and publishes other risk-takers others have not seemed to publish. A poet/scholar friend suggested my work; Chris asked for a manuscript; he liked the work; and we evolved to a contract and a collection of poems. I am deeply grateful for the ways in which Salt shows it believes in me and my *voice*. The faith Chris seems to have in me as an intelligent person and an artist is the kind of faith I've found only one other place: the Fulton County Arts Council in Atlanta and its Deputy Director, Val Porter.

In Exquisite Heats, your work incorporates a variety of poetic forms. Could you speak a little on using poetic forms in your writing?

Ah ... poetic forms. They are helpful play things; by that, I mean it has aided my poem-building skills tremendously to be knowledgeable about forms and make conscious decisions about using them in my work. I've found the most gifted and compelling poets to be those who know the rules and deliberately break them in order to keep their own voices intact. At this stage in my own evolution, the use of forms is both conscious and subconscious. Most of the time I know exactly what I've done after I've done it; but I'm at my best when I don't know what I'm doing while I'm doing it. Poetic forms for me are a good musical instrument to ensure this "band" called my body of work can jam as long and hard as it likes. But I'll be a traitor and leave the forms on the side of the stage if the poem instructs me to do so. Forms come often in my work, but I'm not a slave to them. My only allegiance is to the poem.

Do you use critique groups—or a network of other poets—to help with early drafts of poems?

I don't use critique groups as much as I used to about five to eight years ago. I have trusted eyes and ears who can hear new drafts at any time of the day and give me honest feedback. Usually, these are writers who have known me and my work for a long time and have earned my respect and trust. I'm not closed to critique groups, but I am leery of group dynamics and individual dramas that can be a bit distracting to the purpose of gathering: work.

In your bio for Exquisite Heats, it’s mentioned that you’ve received several grants and fellowships for your writing. Any application tips for other poets who may apply for grants or fellowships?

Yes ... apply. It may sound strange to give this as advice, but many people don't even fill out the application and wonder why they can't get grants. Other tips:

1) Be sure you really want it. Don't apply just for the money. Make sure your values align with the org or individual who is awarding the money, and make sure you believe in what the grant asks of you.

2) Apply again, if you don't get an award the first time you apply. Sometimes, missing a grant or fellowship has nothing to do with your talent or your perfect application. It has to do with timing, the number of other talented applicants and whether or not you come across as credible on paper.

3) Do what the grantors ask. This means meet deadlines, do the accompanying essay, and have a solid plan to do what you say you're going to do with the money. Having been both a grant recipient and a grant reviewer, I can truly say, if you're not sincere, it comes through loud and clear that you're not sincere.

Your bio mentions you’re a fiber artist. In what forms of fiber arts do you work?

I am a quilter who uses techniques of collage, crochet, knitting and mixed media formats. I have no formal training in any of this. I learned quilting at my paternal grandmother's feet at age 7. I learned crochet from my maternal grandmother at age 9. I've experimented with everything else enough to be *confident* about what I create. I explore the same themes in fiber art as I do in poetry: women, the South, folklore, sound music in language, myths, non-linear structures and magical realism. Much of the way I approach art is really about not wasting a single thing. Even the words you cut from a poem or the scraps you create when you cut the fabric of a quilt can be used somewhere else.

Who are you currently reading?

Two voices I think many of us have forgotten: Dolores Kendrick and Sherley Anne Williams. I am also reading a variety of modern verse plays because I'm curious about what others are doing with the form.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice for other poets, what would it be?

Write! And then write some more. When you feel like you truly (((can))) *quit* writing, then you should quit ...

*****

To learn more about Cherryl's collection Exquisite Heats and her publisher Salt Publishing, go to www.saltpublishing.com.

*****

Are you a poet or publisher looking for free publicity? Then, check out what you need to do to be considered for a Poetic Asides interview by clicking here.

Interview With Poet Denise Duhamel

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:19:19 GMT

(Note to prompt-hungry poets: This is not a prompt; please don't mistakenly post your poems for prompts into the comments of this blog post.)

Okay, so I know everyone's busy with writing poems for the April PAD Challenge and reading everyone else's poems, but I've got a great interview with a great poet burning a hole in my pocket. So, I'm gonna go ahead and post it here.

I remember first reading Denise Duhamel's Queen for a Day (University of Pittsburgh Press) while flying from one place to another. I can't remember which trip now, but maybe that's because while I was in the plane (both ways), I was sucked into Duhamel's poems. Anyway, I recently learned about her most recent collection Ka-Ching! (also University of Pittsburgh Press) and used that as an excuse to interview her.

There are many great poems in Ka-Ching!, but one of my favorites is this sestina:

Delta Flight 659
--to Sean Penn

I'm writing this on a plane, Sean Penn,
with my black Pilot Razor ballpoint pen.
Ever since 9/11, I'm a nervous flyer. I leave my Pentium
Processor in Florida so TSA can't x-ray my stanzas, penetrate
my persona. Maybe this should be in iambic pentameter,
rather than this mock sestina, each line ending in a Penn

variant. I convinced myself the ticket to Baghdad was too expensive.
I contemplated going as a human shield. I read in open-
mouthed shock, that your trip there was a $56,000 expenditure.
Is that true? I watched you on Larry King Live--his suspenders
and tie, your open collar. You saw the war's impending
mess. My husband gambled on my penumbra

of doubt. So you station yourself at a food silo in Iraq. What happens
to me if you get blown up? He begged me to stay home, be his Penelope.
I sit alone in coach, but last night I sat with four poets, depending
on one another as readers, in a Pittsburgh cafe. I tried to be your pen
pal in 1987, not because of your pensive
bad boy looks, but because of a poem you'd penned

that appeared in an issue of Frank. I still see the poet in you, Sean Penn.
You probably think fans like me are your penance
for your popularity, your star bulging into a pentagon
filled with witchy wanna-bes and penniless
poets who waddle toward your icy peninsula
of glamour like so many menancing penguins.

But honest, I come in peace, Sean Penn,
writing on my plane ride home. I want no part of your penthouse
or the snowy slopes of your Aspen.
I won't stalk you like the swirling grime cloud over Pig Pen.
I have no scripts or stupendous
novel I want you to option. I even like your wife, Robin Wright Penn.

I only want to keep myself busy on this flight, to tell you of four penny-
loafered poets in Pennsylvania
who, last night, chomping on primavera penne
pasta, pondered poetry, celebrity, Iraq, the penitentiary
of free speech. And how I reminded everyone that Sean Penn
once wrote a poem. I peer out the window, caress my lucky pendant:

Look, Sean Penn, the clouds are drawn with charcoal pencils.
The sky is opening like a child's first stab at penmanship.
The sun begins to ripen orange, then deepen.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I am teaching, giving a lot of readings, and writing at least 5 minutes a day. That was my resolution for 2008. I thought I can always find five minutes, right? Even if it's in the morning before coffee or before I fall asleep.

Sean Penn won another Best Actor Oscar recently for his role in Milk. As someone who's written a sestina for Penn, what is your favorite Sean Penn role?

My favorite Sean Penn role is actually Brad Whitewood, Jr. in the movie At Close Range. Penn plays Christopher Walker's son.

It seems that I see your name all over the place when reading online literary journals. Do prefer publication in online or print? Does the medium even matter?

I'm open to online magazines as well as print magazines. I am a fetishist when it comes to paper, so I like holding literary journals in my hands, but I also am excited by the idea of having work up online. More people see it that way and, even though the work is on a flickering screen, it somehow seems more permanent.

How do you handle the process of submitting your work?

I have some magazines that I really love and send to often. So I send to those places as well as new start up magazines. I am all about supporting the smallest of mags as that is where my poems were first published when no one else wanted them.

How do you go about putting your collections together?

My friend Stephanie Strickland reads though stacks of poems and helps me find the most accomplished ones and then we start looking for themes. She helped me enormously with Ka-Ching!

In Ka-Ching!, you use form a lot--from sestinas to prose poems in the shape of money. How important do you feel forms are to a developing (or even established) poet? Also, do you think they serve a purpose for the reader?

I resisted traditional form for a long time—I had a sonnet in my first book and then it was free verse and prose poems pretty much until Two and Two. I started feeling comfortable with form because of my collaborations with Maureen Seaton who is a master/mistress of the sonnet. When I wrote forms with her, I finally "got" how they were very freeing and fun. I think it's important for me to challenge myself and change and not get too comfortable in my poetry.

In Ka-Ching!, you include many confessional poems that involve yourself, your husband (the poet Nick Carbo), and others. In your confessional poems, do you draw a line between reality and fiction? And if so, how do you determine where to make that line fuzzy?

I don't really draw the line so much. I love poetry because it is about memory and the way I remember things change and forms of poetry force me to change the story and my way of remembering.

Who (or what) are have you been reading recently?

Ed Falco's In the Park of Culture (short fictions), Bust (magazine subscription), NOR #5 (literary magazine), 5 a.m. #28 (literary magazine), and Mary Jane Ryals' The Moving Waters (poetry.)

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

Read everything! Be open to everything. Trust your process.

*****

To find out more about Duhamel and Ka-Ching!, try visiting the University of Pittsburgh Press website at http://www.upress.pitt.edu.

Interview With 2008 Poetic Asides Poet Laureate Sara Diane Doyle

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:21:27 GMT

Quick note: I plan on sharing the complete rules, how-to's, advice, etc., on the 2009 April PAD Challenge tomorrow right here on the blog. There's no special registration required--so just check back in tomorrow to get the full scoop on what's expected.

*****

Okay, so one of the cool things about the 2008 April PAD Challenge is that I was able to select a Poetic Asides Poet Laureate. It was a tough decision last year, but Sara Diane Doyle shared some truly great poems through the month. See the announcement (and read some of here April poems) by clicking here.

She even shared a new poetic form with the group after the challenge was over called The Roundabout. You can check out that poetic form by clicking here.

Anyway, she recently let me interview her to see what she's been up to and to share advice with poets new to the April PAD Challenge.

*****

What've you been up to since being named the 2008 April PAD Challenge Poet Laureate?

You mean besides enjoying life in Colorado? Well, I've spent the last year mentoring teen writers, including challenging them with a 12-week poetry project last fall. In November, I wrote a novel with National Novel Writing Month. As of January, I've been focusing on submitting my work, both poetry and prose, to markets.

Who (or what) have you been reading recently?

In 2008, I read 100 books, so I had the chance to read a lot of great writers, including: N.M. Kelby, C.S. Lewis, Alice Hoffman, Madeleine L'Engle, Jane Austen, Garth Nix, and Billy Collins. This year, I'm taking it easier. My current favorites are Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, and my favorite poetry collection of the last few months is Billy Collins' Ballistics. Much of my reading time goes to reading the writings of the teenagers on the forum where I mentor.

How did you manage to write so many good poems throughout the month of April last year?

I don't have a secret recipe, if that's what you're asking! But I know that the more I'm thinking about poetry, the more I'm reading it and writing it, the better I seem to get. So being able to read the poems others were posting helped--it kept spurring me on to better poetry! Also, having the prompts helped a lot. Normally, I have one good poem every so often, largely because I wait to be hit with a great idea. But having a starting point helped get those ideas going. I also tried my hardest to find a different angle on the prompt each day. For example, on day one, when the prompt was to write about "firsts," I saw many poems about first love, first kiss, first child, etc. So I said to myself, "what is a first no one else has written about yet?" That's how I came up with the idea to write about the first time I donated blood. I love to find the tiny, hidden subjects. And if it makes anyone feel better, I had some real clunkers last year--they STILL make me cringe when I read them. So don't try to write 30 amazing poems, write 30 good poems and some of them will be amazing.

Any big plans or goals for 2009?

My goal this year is to get published. So I'm sending out submissions of both poetry and short stories on a regular basis. I'd also like to finish my current novel. And maybe learn another language. I like to have fun goals, and some that I know I can reach with a little effort. Unreachable goals aren't helpful at all.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given? And by who?

There are two that vie for first place. The first was "celebrate rejection." My high school creative writing teacher, Mrs. Warner, made this a huge part of our class--she threw a party for the first rejection slip, and really taught me how to embrace the more negative part of the writing life. Rejection is part of the writing business, and if you can't deal with it, or if you take it too personally, it's going to kill you. So I celebrate every rejection I earn--earning a rejection means I'm putting my work out there, and that's how I will get published.

The second is from one of my favorite authors, Jodi Picoult. Her advice: "You can't edit a blank page." That statement has gotten me writing more times than not. A blank page can be intimidating, and I know how easy it is to give into the white space. Sometimes, we are afraid for writing crap, afraid of what will come out, afraid it will be true, etc. But we can't do anything with that fear. We can't edit it, we can't cut out the bad parts, we can't make it better. But if we are willing to write, to fill the blank page, then we can move forward. Most writers aren't brilliant in the first draft. We all have to just get the words down. Once we've done that, it's much easier to make things better!

Do you have any advice for the poets who are entering the 2009 April PAD Challenge?

Yes! Get up and read the prompt early each day. Get it into your head. Then take some time to see it from all sides before you write. Some days, an idea will jump out right away, but some days it might take until nine at night. Don't be afraid to let the idea brew for a while! Pull out all the old tools you were taught in grade school: alliteration, meter, imagery, similes, metaphors, symbolism. Put them to good use. Try some new forms, even if the prompt doesn't call for it. I often use www.shadowpoetry.com as a resource, they list all sorts of poetic forms.

Then, just write. Get it out. Remember, you can edit it later.

And most of all, have fun! I had a blast last year, and I'm looking forward to this year's prompts. Let your friends and family know what you are doing, let them read some of your work. Be excited about poetry!

Interview With Poet Patricia Fargnoli

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:07:12 GMT

It's not every day that I get an opportunity to interview a former poet laureate. So when I was afforded the chance to read Patricia Fargnoli's Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press), I jumped at the chance to interview the former New Hampshire Poet Laureate (her term ended earlier this year).

Though Fargnoli is a retired psychotherapist, she just published her first collection of poems Necessary Light (Utah State University Press) in 1999. And has made her presence felt in the poetry community in a very short period of time with another full-length collection and chapbook in the same 10-year span. Oh yeah, Fargnoli is also in the final stages of publishing another collection with Tupelo Press.

Here's one of my favorites (I have many) from Duties of the Spirit:

The Undeniable Pressure of Existence

I saw the fox running by the side of the road
past the turned-away brick faces of the condominiums
past the Citco gas station with its line of cars and trucks
and he ran, limping, gaunt, matted dull haired
past Jim's Pizza, past the Wash-O-Mat
past the Thai Garden, his sides heaving like bellows
and he kept running to where the interstate
crossed the state road and he reached it and ran on
under the underpass and beyond it past the perfect
rows of split-levels, their identical driveways
their brookless and forestless yards,
and from my moving car, I watched him,
helpless to do anything to help him, certain he was beyond
any aid, any desire to save him, and he ran loping on,
far out of his element, sick, panting, starving,
his eyes fixed on some point ahead of him,
some possible salvation
in all this hopelessness, that only only he could see.

*****

What are you currently up to?

On March 22, I finished my 3 1/2-year term as New Hampshire's Poet Laureate. And my new book, Then, Something, which is due to be published in fall by Tupelo Press, is at the publishers and soon to go into production. We've already decided on the cover. I've also recently finished work with two private tutorial students...all of which should mean that I could rest a while, and, hopefully, turn my energies toward writing new work. But March's calendar is full of readings I want to attend and lunches with poet/friends and teaching my private class. And April's only a little freer. The last week in April and the beginning of May I'm going to The Dorset Writer's Colony in Vermont for a week (and would go longer if I didn't have a cat and no one for him to live with in my absence). In June, I'm teaching at an Elderhostel for a week, and leading an Ekphrasis workshop in July and a workshop for Teachers in August. In between, I'm giving a couple of readings....and will be working at proofreading my manuscript for the press...and writing a reader's guide. Whew! Would you believe I've been "retired" for 10 years now?

You've just recently finished up a stint as New Hampshire's Poet Laureate. What were your duties? Were you able to accomplish everything you wanted?

As poet laureate, I had no official duties. Some poet laureates do a little or nothing; some do a lot. I like that what I did was left entirely up to me so that I could use the skills and interests I have in the way I wanted to. I'd decided from the outset that I wanted to do something for children, something for libraries and something for New Hampshire poets. And I'm proud that I accomplished all three. With the support of the NH State Library, The Writer's Project and the NH Council on the Arts, I was able to recruit 43 poet-volunteers from around the state, and to organize a "Children's Poetry Day in the Libraries Day" the first April after I was elected. The Governor issued a proclamation proclaiming April 14th as statewide "Children's Poetry Day;" and each volunteer put on a program for children in a library near him/her. We published articles in almost every regional magazine promoting the importance of poetry in children's lives and served about 350 children and parents on that day.

I also initiated (again with the help of Art Council personnel) a "New Hampshire Poets Showcase" link to the Arts Council website. Every two weeks we featured a new NH poet with a poem, bio, photo, links and a paragraph about how their poem came to be.

I also did readings and workshops around the state and attended civil functions occasionally. And I delivered a poem at the Governor's Inauguration.

When I look back at what I accomplished I'm amazed that I could do it. I had reservations about accepting the position in the beginning because of some chronic health problems that have limited my mobility and energy. But I'm glad I didn't turn it down; the position was life-enriching. I made many friends and have some wonderful memories.

When and why did you begin publishing poetry?

I began writing and studying poetry seriously when I was in my mid-30's in a graduate class with Brendan Galvin at Central CT State University. Along with 7 other women who became my close friends (and are to this day), I took the class for several years. My first poems were published in Tendril (which has been gone for years) and Poet Lore. In fact, Brendan sent out my work to Tendril without telling me and when, one of the poems was accepted, he called me from his vacationing on Cape Cod to give me the news.

I was hooked. I've always loved poetry and had written it earlier...publishing in the high school newspaper etc., but I knew nothing then about contemporary poetry and the only two poets' names I was familiar with were Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. However, it was many years later, when I was 62, that I published my first book, Necessary Light, after Mary Oliver chose it as the May Swenson Award winner.

The "why" is harder to explain. Besides the love of poetry, there's the challenge of getting what can't be easily said into words; the thrill of connecting in a deep way to readers, the adrenaline rush when you open an acceptance letter and the way writing a poem can somehow make sense of your life.

Do you have any method to where and when you submit your poems?

Hmmm. I usually submit about 3 times a year....in late September, January, and maybe June (to those journals that accept summer submissions). But this isn't rigid and if I have some poems I want to send out and have the time, I'll send them. I have a list of journals I'd like to have my poems in...a rather long list. Over the years, I've subscribed to many of them and I know what kind of work they take. I believe strongly that poets shouldn't be expecting editors to publish them if they, themselves, aren't supporting the work of presses, literary journals, and other poets.

I only occasionally do simultaneous submissions because it's hard to keep track of them. But I do them more lately because I am 71 and time is passing far too quickly...I can't afford to wait a year to hear results anymore...especially since the competition is so fierce and rejection so frequent. And when I do submit simultaneously, I don't send to more than 3 journals at a time, or to journals that don't accept them. But other than that, I have no specific method.

Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press) won the Jane Kenyon Poetry Book Award and your first collection Necessary Light (Utah State University Press) won the May Swenson Book Award. What do you think makes a good collection?

Oh Robert, it is so, so subjective! I've several times been a judge or early-round judge of a book competition so I've read hundreds of manuscripts and I can tell what impresses me....though it probably would be different for someone else. At the top of my list is "Vision." I mean that the book presents the poet's unique way of looking at the world....some fragment of the whole. And the poems must "matter" and, when taken together, seem like a cohesive whole (even though there may be single poems that are different from most of the others)....I don't have patience with the superficial or pretentious language that reveals nothing when you look under it. I look for depth. Craft matters to me greatly. And once I gave top prize to a book (a novel in verse) mainly because I fell in love with the "voice" of the protagonist. (He was an ironic everyman.) Of course, the craft was impeccable too.

What do you look for in a good poem?

Depth, beauty, spirit, craft, sound, humanity. Sometimes fracturing and remaking of reality, so that I as a reader can see a thing newly. Some news to help me understand my own life and its meaning.

In Duties of the Spirit, you deal with nature and aging--even confronting death. These topics are big and well-traveled, yet you make them your own. I'm sure part of your success comes back to revision. So, how much time do you commit to revision? And how do you know a poem is done?

Revision is, for me, the process by which a poem comes into being. My early drafts are terrible. I often overwrite pushing myself past all the voices in my head that say "Ugh" just in order to get words onto the page where they can be worked at. I then will do maybe 3 or 4 quick revisions and put it away for at least a few days. Then I work at it again. If I can get it into what begins to feel to me like a poem and I'm as far as I can go, I'll bring it to one of my workshops (there are 2; one of them is online). That usually results in another revision. I have what I call my "WP file," which stands for "Working Poems." The revised draft (if I'm still not satisfied which is usually the case) goes into that file...and periodically, I'll pull it up and work some more.

In later drafts, often, I'm picking at single words, or perhaps upping the ante on a phrase that feels flat...or experimenting with shifting the order around or changing line-breaks...that kind of thing. I've often worked this way on a poem for years before I'm satisfied...if I ever am. And even when I send out a poem, I'll later revise it... or even after it's published. I don't know when a poem is done....it's mostly just let go.

I think of revision as being like a sculptor with a block of marble. The poet chips and chips away at the poem until the real poem (hopefully) emerges from the block of words.

Who (or what) have you been reading recently?

I read poetry every day...and not just a little. I have 7 bookcases (3 of them tall ones) in my 2 room apartment and they are all filled with books of poetry. I spend more on poetry than I do on anything else except food and rent. Currently on my bedstand (which means I'm reading them) are: Robert Hass Time and Materials (which I'm reading for the second time); Mary Oliver's New Evidence; Louise Gluck's Averno (also reading for the 2nd time); Borges This Craft of Verse; Rebecca Seiferle, Bitters; BAP, Charles Wright, ed; Henri Coles, Blackbird and Wolf; Charles Bennett's How to Make a Woman Out of Water; Ruth Stone's What Love Comes to; The Making of A Sonnet, Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland; Dante's Divine Comedy; and the current issues of several journals: The Georgia Review, Shenandoah,The Harvard Review and The American Poetry Journal.

On order are Ann Fisher-Wirth's Carta Marina and Jack Gilbert's new book (which I've forgotten the name of).

If you could offer only one piece of advice to your fellow poets, what would it be?

Read, read, read, and support other poets, publishers and the poetry community.

*****

To learn more about Patricia Fargnoli, check out her website at www.patriciafargnoli.com.

Interview With Poet Jericho Brown

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:55:10 GMT

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an M.F.A. from the University of New Orleans and a B.A. from Dillard University, and he has served as poetry editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner. The recipient of the Bunting Fellowship at Harvard University, a Cave Canem Fellowship, and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego where he teaches creative writing. Western Michigan University's New Issues Poetry & Prose published his first book, Please.

Brown's name has been flying around quite a bit recently--with multiple poets either praising his collection Please (New Issues) or e-mailing me directly to ask if I'd interview him. That's not typical. So, I hunted him down, and he took some time out of his busy schedule to let me interview him.

His collection Please was a great read from the very beginning. He even names the first section Repeat, which is funny, because I felt like repeating the experience of reading the beginning once I finished the end. But I'll let his words do the talking--this being one of my favorite pieces in the collection:

Why I Cannot Leave You

You bring home the food. I'm your hungry man,
Captive damsel dragged by the hair from her favorite
Streetlight to the trap of your tower, hollow icebox,
No magnets with things-to-do. No rules. It wouldn't
Be fair--you bring home the food--you can't read
Or write. I pace, check the window for my hunter. You
Bring home food and toss it onto the card table.
My teeth barely miss my fingertips--I rip
Into the bag. You like to kiss me, my mouth
Packed with the faintest franchise you could find, animal
Blood at each lip. Say carnivore, and I kiss back. I eat
My meat rare. You bare your sharpest grin. Bum
I say I love, you're my place to stay. We're against the law.
No one keeps me big as you. Fatten me, sweet ogre.
Get me some meat. Bring home food. Feed.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I'm trying to get a hold of any footage I can that shows news anchors Max Robinson and Jessica Savitch in action. I'm working on a few poems about and in the voices of the two of them as well as poems based on scriptures from the Bible. The second book is tentatively titled The New Testament, and I just learned that I got a Bunting Fellowship which should give me plenty of time for writing.

I'm grateful that I've been traveling a lot in order to give readings. I now get to meet really interesting people from all over the nation who love good poetry. Also, I try to make sure I have enough reading material to keep me busy on planes.

Other than that, I go to the gym a lot. I eat a lot. I talk with friends over the phone a lot. I teach a lot and read a lot in preparation for teaching. I usually go clubbing when I get the chance because I like flirting and dancing.

Please is your debut collection of poems. How long did you go about getting them together and published?

The oldest drafts of some poems in Please were written in 2000, and I wrote them when I first attended the Cave Canem workshop/retreat for African American poets. Some poems were first drafted 2007, the same year New Issues asked to publish the book.

But seven years seems dishonest when I think of how I'm prone to reading and thinking more than to writing. In the last eight years of my life, there were times I couldn't stop writing. Over a short period of weeks, I'd have many drafts of very different things and begin to think I may be quite literally possessed. Once, I actually had a car accident trying to get some scribbling done while driving. These periods were thrilling for me, but during them, I felt vulnerable in a way I have a hard time characterizing.

At other times, for periods as long as two years within the last eight, I didn't write at all. I couldn't even think to revise. This is, of course, painful and scary in a very different way. Today, I think I managed to get through these silences because I was much more interested in figuring how to write poems than I was in how to write a book. I had no goal other than the poem itself and could almost satisfy my yearnings to write by reading and discovering other poets.

The voices are strong in Please. Is there a type of sound or voice (or both) you go for in your writing?

I think of writing, first, as a process of listening and, second, as a process of embodying. I don't know that I "go for" anything in particular because I try and leave as much as I can to instinct, intuition, and reflex—even in the final stages of revision.

For me, poems usually begin with a line from which I do some vocal repeating and pushing in order to generate other lines. The lines that follow the first one often mimic the sound or make what seems to me some sort of counter-sound based on the first one. Then, because I'm so interested in both music and voice, I find myself trying to figure the personality of the sounds as I am composing. At some point in the writing of a first draft, I start to take on the characteristics of the voice that is asking to be channeled. An example of this might be something as simple as punching the computer if the voice is pissed to the point of violence.

You have a very nice website. Did you put it together, or did your publisher? Also, how helpful do you think having a website is in spreading the word about your writing?

Thanks, Robert. Jerichobrown.com is the brainchild of Nick Walker, one of my undergraduate students at the University of San Diego. He's an amazing poet, and he writes wonderful fiction too. Nick and I argued for more than a semester. He insisted that the website would be necessary, and I kept reassuring him that I had enough to do without thinking about ways to publicize my book and spending mounds of money to do it.

At any rate, Nick started making moves without me being aware of it, and the next thing I knew he had come in contact with Arlene Valdes, a very talented web designer who was looking to build a portfolio for her business. The portfolio would include a few clients for whom she'd create sites for one-tenth of what I imagine she charges now. Nick and Arlene made all the decisions and did all the work. My only job was to provide them with what I had already gathered for New Issues: a bio, the blurbs, the dates for readings, and of course, a few poems.

I don't think having a website hurts, but Buddha never had one, and the word spread pretty decently about things he had to say.

Your bio mentions that you previously worked as a speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans. What was that job like? And did your experience as a speechwriter help with your poetry?

I served the City of New Orleans for four years working for Mayor Marc H. Morial, who is now President and CEO of the National Urban League. He's an amazing leader who made his love for that city absolutely contagious. He is also a major role model for me as my fraternity brother and the man willing to take a chance on me and give me my first job right out of college. (The word "give" is supremely important here, considering the desperate shape I was in.)

A speechwriter goes into each speech knowing the message and figuring the best way to communicate the message as he goes. A poet figures ways of communicating and wonders if he has a message. I prefer the latter because it gives me a chance to question beliefs that I myself hold dear. There is no room for such questions when working to drive a message home.

While researching you online, I noticed people commenting positively on your readings. Do you have any special reading tips for other poets?

Slow down.

Who are you currently reading?

Today, I read Versed by Rae Armantrout, some Gwendolyn Brooks, a few poems online by Rodney Jack and Wayne Johns, some George Oppen, some C.S. Lewis, a little bit from Barbara Walters'memoir Audition, and the Bible.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Make love.

*****

To learn more about Jericho, go to www.jerichobrown.com.

To learn more about his publisher, go to www.wmich.edu/~newissue/.

Interview With Poet J.P. Dancing Bear

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:05:04 GMT

For a few years now, I've been aware of J.P. Dancing Bear's work--from seeing his name floating around in literary journals. It wasn't until we became friends on Facebook (a year or so ago) that I knew he was the editor of American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press, as well as host of "Out of Our Minds" (a weekly poetry program on public radio station KKUP). Dancing Bear is also the author of What Language (Slipstream), Billy Last Crow (Turning Point), Gacela of Narcissus City (Main Street Rag), and--most recently--Conflicted Light (Salmon Poetry).

Here's a favorite poem of mine from Conflicted Light:

Auricle

I heard the humming engine
of a heart smaller than an anvil;
in the hummingbird's forest
my ear was mistaken for a flower--
I should be complimented
for the brief moment before
the taste of my ear canal
will forever mark the thin tongue.
The hunger that was whispered
to me, woke me from a dream:

I was the drum in the redwoods,
the tongue of green prophesies,
the anvil of summer hunger,
awakened to the canopy songs
that had lain in the linens of leaves
I called my stomach. Now I hear
the hammer's rumor of sparks
on the anvil and can taste fear.
Now I realize I worked for years
in the coded silence of a paper heart.

*****

What are you currently up to?

Well, I tend to keep fairly busy most of the time. Right now, I'm working on getting Bruce Cohen's book, Disloyal Yo-Yo, published. I'm also putting the final touches on my next book, Inner Cities of Gulls, which will come out by Salmon Poetry next year. I just went through and revised my other manuscript for submission to a few contests. I've been writing two other manuscript/projects, Birthday Notes and Dancing to Orphee's Radio. Then there's reading for the Dream Horse Press and the APJ.

You're the editor of American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press; you host the "Out of Our Minds" radio show on KKUP; and you’re constantly getting your own writing published widely. How do you manage to wear so many poetic hats at once?

I try not to think about how much work there is to do. I try to remain focused on whatever the task is at hand, get it done and move on. I think it also helps that I normally don't require as much sleep as most people do. I've been a 4.5 to 6 hour sleeper since I was a kid—used to drive my parents crazy that I would stay awake until 2 sometimes 3 in the morning. And for the longest time, my writing time was between midnight and 2 a.m., but I've learned to write whenever the mood takes me. Dream Horse requires and APJ require that I set aside whole portions of a day to work on them. I like to work at least 4 to 8 hours straight on either.

Your recent collection, Conflicted Light, was released by an Irish publisher (Salmon Poetry). How did that come about?

I think Jessie Lendennie (the owner of Salmon Poetry) and I were on a large group mailing list together at one point. I tend to lurk, but I will chime in when I think I have something to offer on a topic that hasn't already been expressed. I had piped up about something and about a day later I got a message from Jessie saying she'd read my work and really liked it. I had been a fan of Salmon Poetry (I've got several titles on my shelves) for quite some time, and well… the rest just fell into place.

What do you feel makes a great collection of poems?

I think there are any number of things that work to make a great collection of poems. If you are asking me to step out of my Dream Horse Press editor's hat, then I would say that a great collection of poems is one in which every page is something to be savored. That you read the first poem and it is like a fine and delicate morsel of food. You want to take your time and enjoy it. You know just from that first poem that you are in for a gourmet meal. You do not want to rush to the next page, you may want to read one or two poems a day. And reread them. And then again.

If I'm wearing my Dream Horse Press editor's hat… I like to look for collections that hold together as a larger poem. I also enjoy crafted poems that clearly show the writer's knowledge and skill without taking away from the poem at all. In other words, I think there should be something in the poems for a second and third reading that make those just as enjoyable as the first reading.

On a poem-by-poem level, what is the typical life of one of your poems—from idea to publication?

I tend to work in projects or manuscripts first. So a project comes to me sometimes as a couple of poems that I can see go together, or I will sometimes challenge myself in some way, creating a set of rules that I have to follow. I don't have one set way of writing a poem, sometimes it's a line that comes to me, sometimes it's an idea or a thought I begin exploring, sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's a voice. I will usually play with it in my head for several days. Rolling it back and forth, adding to and taking away from it until I feel there's a core something there.

Then I will write it down, usually the first draft will take about an hour. I will then read it aloud and edit it until I think it "sounds" right. Then I have a few friends whom I might "try it out" on. I'll get feedback and "try" to incorporate that back into the poem. Then I'll set the poem aside. I will generally write about three quarters to four fifths of a manuscript (or when I know there's only a few months left) before I start sending poems from that project.

I do this for a number of reasons: One, it gives me distance from the first poems I wrote in the series, so I can stand back and look at them and decide if they are ready, or edit them to the point of being ready; Two, I will not get discouraged about the entire project if the poems are rejected, and therefore question whether I should continue working on the project; Three, the editing and submission functions, I find, are distractions from the actual creative action, so I don't like to do that until later in the project. If a poem is accepted, I may want to tinker with it a little more, nothing too big, a word or a phrase at most. If a poem is rejected, I will go back and review it, read it aloud several times, possibly revise it, and send it out again. At the point where about a quarter to half of the manuscript has been published, I will begin sending that out.

The exception to this rule has been my Birthday Notes project on Facebook. The rules I set out for myself is that the poems have to be written using an application available to me when I go to the person having a birthday that day's wall, I will also put them together and publish them on my Notes/Wall page, and I write a prose poem there on their wall and it has to be done on that day. Since it's all done on the spur of the moment, it's a different kind of writing. I have to make a decision and run with it right away. Sometimes there's been as many as nine of them to write, and you just can't deliberate choices and ideas.

How important do you feel community is to a poet?

I have mixed feelings about it. Online, I tend to enjoy being "connected" to writers all over the planet. We have fun, and I think some of us are playful. I also enjoy playing word games with other writers. And touching base with them.

The physically local writing communities really depend on where you are and who you fall in with. I think it also depends on the types of personalities that are part of the formal organization. I remember back in the late nineties a group of us used to get together, go to readings, put together potluck gatherings and had a lot of fun doing it. It was all done in the spirit of openness and we were trying to reach across political, group or community lines. The events were very informal and fun. I've been part of more formalized organizations and it frankly wasn't my cup of tea.

I appreciate those kinds of groups when they are done right, and one of them I think that does a good job is Poetry Santa Cruz, they present or sponsor a couple of readings a month (usually at least one with a writer who is visiting the area), and are involved in fostering a strong poetry community.

However, I tend to be better with the online community because I can work in being a part of them to compliment my schedule, I cannot necessarily do this with the physical ones.

Who are you currently reading?

Eesh. This is not an easy answer for me because I am constantly reading. And I could answer this with any number of parameters. So first, I'll split out the dead writers and list them (in no particular order) first: James Wright, Federico Garcia Lorca, Robert Frost, John Berryman, Larry Levis, John Logan, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Lynda Hull, W. H. Auden, Neruda, Paul Celan, and Reginald Shepherd (if you ask me tomorrow, I'd probably have a different list depending on memory).

I tend to read a lot of magazines (both online and printed) and there are certain names that I will naturally gravitate to and read first, and I would say the same holds true if I'm in a bookstore and I see their name on the spine of a book (and I am going to limit this list to authors with more than one book published): Nance van Winckel, Natasha Saje, Mary Ruefle, Roddy Lumsden, Kathleen Jamie, Ralph Angel, Jack Gilbert, Mary Jo Bang, Carolyn Forche, Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, Jim Powell, Dorianne Laux, Margret Gibson, Mary Oliver, John Ashbury, Paul Guest, Mark Doty, Sherman Alexie, Robert Bly (and again, these were off the top of my head, and I'm sure I would have a different list tomorrow). I will also add that I read and seek out any of the authors that I've published. And just to round this off, if you are a friend of mine, naturally I'm going to read your poem if I see it.

I will also say that I like to read many different writers and have an ever-expanding list of favorites. I feel, that it is essential to keeping an open mind and to being a good editor.

If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?

Constantly push and challenge yourself to do new things and learn new things. If you've never written a sonnet, then challenge yourself to writing a crown of sonnets. If you've never written anything other than formal verse, write a prose poem. Breaking down things, understanding the craft behind them and rebuilding the way you write only makes you a stronger and better writer. Never, ever think you are "there"--always be on the journey.

*****

To learn more about J.P. Dancing Bear (including Dream Horse Press and American Poetry Journal), check out his website at http://home.comcast.net/~jpdancingbear/.

To learn more about Salmon Poetry, which published Conflicted Light, check out their website at www.salmonpoetry.com.

Interview With Poet Susan Rich

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:00:15 GMT

Susan Rich is a special kind of poet--one who has gotten out and seen the world first hand before setting pen to paper (or keystroke to word processor). She's worked in the field of human rights for nine years; lived and/or worked in Bosnia, Gaza, Ireland, South Africa and Republic of Niger; was shot at in Croatia; and photographed for a recent book on women's body images. With so many experiences, most people would be filled with good stories, but Rich is also able to craft these tales into wonderful poems.

White Pine Press published Rich's first two collections, The Cartographer's Tongue (2000) and Cures Include Travel (2006), and plans on releasing her third collection, The Alchemist's Kitchen, in 2010. Both of her published collections share the knowledge of a writer who's seen the world--as the titles indicate.

Here's a favorite of mine from Cures Include Travel:

Mohamud at the Mosque

for my student upon his graduation

And some time later in the lingering
blaze of summer, in the first days
after September 11 you phoned--

If I don't tell anyone my name I'll
pass for an African American.
And suddenly, this seemed a sensible solution--

the best protection: to be a black man
born in America, more invisible than
Somali, Muslim, asylum seeker--

Others stayed away that first Friday
but your uncle insisted that you pray.
How fortunes change so swiftly

I hear you say. And as you parallel
park across from the Tukwila
mosque, a young woman cries out--

her fears unfurling beside your battered car--
Go back where you came from!
You stand, both of you, dazzling there

in the mid-day light, her pavement
facing off along your parking strip.
You tell me she is only trying

to protect her lawn, her trees,
her untended heart--already
alarmed by its directive.

And when the neighborhood
policeman appears, asks
you, asks her, asks all the others--

So what seems to be the problem?
He actually expects an answer,
as if any of us could name it--

as if perhaps your prayers
chanted as this cop stands guard
watching over your windshield

during the entire service
might hold back the world
we did not want to know.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I'm working on a series of ekphrastic poems inspired by the work of Myra Albert Wiggins (1869-1956). Wiggins was one of the first women artists in the Pacific Northwest to make her living exclusively as an artist. She was a photographer, painter, and poet, but best known for her photographs. For a short time, she exhibited widely in New York and Europe. Alfred Stieglitz published her work in Camera Notes and George Eastman hung one of her photographs in his office at Eastman-Kodak. I'm very drawn to her photographs, in particular, probably because she works from imagined narratives and also traveled widely. I hope to have a small chapbook within my next full length collection, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, coming out in April 2010 from White Pine Press.

This is my first time working on a series of ekphrastic poems, first time writing any poems at all that are inspired by the visual arts and it's sort of magical. Working with images, especially narrative images like the ones Wiggins creates, really functions like the poem's rough draft. I can begin with a girl, a bowl, a dark spoon--and we're off to the races.

I'm also still celebrating my first prize award published in the Times Literary Supplement (of London). My good friend, the poet Kelli Agodon, figured out that my poem earned $333.33 per line or $28.98 per word! WOW! And who said poetry doesn't pay?

With one collection titled The Cartographer's Tongue and another titled Cures Include Travel, travel seems to play a very important role in your poetry. Do you think travel can help a writer grow?

I believe travel offers us a relatively safe way to shed our everyday skins and step outside the closed world we've so carefully constructed around us. In my everyday life I'm in contact with people who often have a shared sense of community, city, country--even if my background is Russian and my neighbor is Somali; but by virtue of living here in the US where I was born, I don't have to examine my everyday assumptions and suppositions.

When I worked in Gaza, I was commonly asked, whether I supported the United States military aide to Israel. In West Africa, I needed to remember, for my two years there, never to extend my left hand in greeting or--God forbid!--eat with it. In Bosnia, one didn't ever ask where a person stayed during the war. These are perhaps a sundry set of examples of how each culture has its own decorum and set of assumptions. What I find so interesting is how rarely we question our own lived ideas.

Yes, I believe travel helps a writer grow, helps anyone grow; allows us the chance to become part of a broader human spectrum of experience.

For your own travel, you've been to places such as Bosnia, Gaza and South Africa. Your poetry often deals with people and events witnessed while on the road. Do you feel you must have something important to say when you sit down to write a poem?

If I thought I needed to only write important poems, I would still be staring into this screen before me. Who needs that kind of pressure?

You've been shot at in Croatia, modeled for a recent book on women's body images, and traveled around the globe; do you feel you live an adventurous life?

When you put it that way, it does sound exciting, doesn't it? No, I am afraid everyday life centers around cups of good coffee and ministering to the cats.

For the last ten years, I have been teaching English and Film Studies at Highline Community College. I have had two sabbaticals, time off for good behavior and done some traveling, but primarily my life is very staid. Seattle is an almost perfect place for a writer to live. I feel very lucky to have found it. I'm originally from Boston, Massachusetts.

What is true is that I am often motivated by fear. If I am offered an experience--such as working in Bosnia only three months after the war--I feel compelled to react against that fear and accept the offers that present themselves in my life. I think it is called counterphobic.

How do you handle the whole submission process from submitting poems to keeping track of your submissions?

I am the odd writer who loves submitting my work. I play the license plate game only with poetry journals and aim to publish in every state--if I can. Over the years it's been a good way to not over think the rejections from the New Yorker or the Atlantic and instead rejoice in smaller, but extremely respectable journals such as the Antioch Review and Quarterly West. To date, my poems have traveled to 33 states and 7 countries. Some states are easier to find journals in than others. In Rhode Island, the choices are limited.

This year, I have had acceptances from three journals that I have been sending to regularly for fifteen years. Fifteen, that's not a typo. In two of the three cases I never even had a "try again" scrawled along the bottom of the rejection slip. In fact, I prefer the pristine, impersonal rejection. Gettysburg Review rejects with high quality paper and in a timely fashion; I like that. They accept in much the same way. As someone who has worked as a poetry editor at several journals, I understand that most of the time there is nothing personal about rejection. I understand, or like to think I understand, that editors are people with bad days and good days.

My little editor fantasy goes like this: It's a sunny afternoon and Mr. or Ms. Editor has just come back to the desk after a light lunch at a favorite restaurant. With a fresh cup of tea and a cat for company, my editor reads my poems. In other words, I believe that timing and context are key. Many different considerations go into the acceptance of a poem and it's impossible to know what they are. You can read back issues of the journal, and that can help you choose food imagery over junkyard cats, but there is still a vast element of the unknown.

My favorite submission story goes like this: A friend of a friend submitted his work to a top literary journal only to have it rejected, but with a note suggesting radical changes. The writer waited a year and then sent the same poems, exactly the same poems (no edits) again. He included a note thanking the editor for such thoughtful suggestions on his work. Final result? One of the poems was accepted. I've also had the same poem rejected and then accepted from another journal. How to explain it except to say that submitting poems is not a realm of science. We send our work out into the world hoping it finds a home; hoping against hope, that it will speak to someone and in another state or on another continent; that we will be seen.

In a previous interview, I saw that you have your students memorize a poem by another poet. Do you feel it's important for poets to memorize their own poetry?

No, I don't. Personally, I'd rather recite Elizabeth Bishop and William Butler Yeats to myself than Susan Rich. Susan Rich isn't bad, but Bishop and Yeats are better.

Who are you currently reading?

My favorite book of poems at the moment is And Her Soul Out of Nothing by Olena Kalytiak Davis. It's the first book in awhile that I find utterly satisfying in its alternating mix of lyric and narrative impulses. For fiction Night Train to Lisbon by Mercier is on my bedside table. My favorite read of the last year was The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway.

If you could pass on only piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

I wish I had come across W. S. Merwin's poem "Berryman" years earlier. I share "Berryman" with my students now and we read it aloud together. The sense that we will never really know if anything we write is any good I find incredibly freeing. If we aren't able to pass judgment on our work, then we are free of that burden. There's nothing that drains the pen more quickly than the rush to decide if this is the next Pulitzer prize-winning poem or not. Recently, a poem of mine won a large prize which arrived with a bucket of award money. The truth is, I was utterly flabbergasted when I learned that the judges, and then the general public, chose this poem. Please don't get me wrong. I am proud of this poem and I am thrilled to have won the award, but I never would have believed that this small piece would go so far. If I had passed judgment on its worth, instead of sending it off into the world, I would have been wrong. What I want to convey is this: Push and sweat to write your best, and after that, leave it to others to judge. Try not to second guess your craft; trust in what you cannot know.

*****

To learn more about Susan Rich, you can visit her website at http://www.susanrich.net.

To learn more about her publisher (and perhaps check out her books), you can visit the White Pine Press website at http://www.whitepine.org.

Interview With Poet Jeannine Hall Gailey

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 06:22:26 GMT

Jeannine Hall Gailey is a West Coast journalist who publishes articles on subject matter as varied as how to bake a perfect scone to how to secure your web services application. (It should also be noted that she is writing a couple pieces for me for the 2010 Poet's Market.)

Gailey's poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and 32 Poems, among others. She's published a chapbook, "Female Comic Book Superheroes" (Pudding House), and a full length collection, Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books). Plus, Jeannine is quick to point out that she still reads comics.

There were many poems from Becoming the Villainess that I absolutely loved, but this is my favorite:

She Escapes the Film Noir

I slip out the door,
wearing a raincoat as disguise.
It might have wrinkles, indicating a recent tryst.
Also, I may wear a fedora.
I will certainly have a lot of hair
falling over the brim of my eyelashes, either because
I'm too busy to cut it
or I don't want anyone looking me in the eyes.
Ominous footsteps echo in an unseen room,
along with distant thunder.
We are unsure of the dialogue in this script.

You watch me lean into the wet, shining street
and peer, nervous, into shadows.
Am I looking for you?
Or the man with a gun?
Either way, I'm holding tickets to Paris.
Care to join me?
I would light a cigarette
except for the damn rain. My lipstick
in this lighting is darker than blood,
and my hands won't stop shaking.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I just finished teaching my first class for National University's MFA program, an all-online Intro to Poetry Seminar. It was fascinating to try to give feedback on poems as a class without all the little tricks of body language and voice inflection; I remembered how much I rely on non-verbal cues when I teach. But it was a great adventure.

I'm working on some new manuscripts: one that investigates female heroines in Japanese pop culture and folk tales, and the idea of "mono no aware" or "softly despairing sorrow," another about being trapped in the physical body and the stories of Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White, and the third is a just-begun collection about growing up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the shadow of the birth-place of nuclear bombs, as the daughter of a robotics scientist. The first two I'm actively seeking publishers for; the third is still in progress.

Also, I just moved to Southern California from the Pacific Northwest, so I'm still trying to get used to all the palm trees, surfers and women that wear Ugg boots when it's 60 degrees. It's definitely an alien landscape.

Becoming the Villainess is your first book-length collection. Did the manuscript develop naturally, or did it go through many versions?

I began putting together a full-length collection as soon as Pudding House Press offered to publish my little chapbook called "Female Comic Book Superheroes." Putting together the chapbook made me realize just how many poems I'd written over ten years with the same themes, the same characters, the same voices. I originally tried to create a more conventionally-poetic, uplifting manuscript, but one day my husband came along and read my manuscript and said something about how the real story of the book was how the speakers go from powerlessness to power, from innocent to corrupt, from the princess to the villainess. So I titled it "Becoming the Villainess" and stopped trying to fight the dark side of the MS or impose a happy ending on the collection. I also had terrific insight from a bunch of friends about the manuscript during the eighteen months I sent it out. Finally, I decided to rearrange it according to comic book structure--the origin story, the character arc, the final frame, and so on. That felt right. And just after I rearranged it that way, Steel Toe Books' Tom Hunley called to say they wanted to publish it.

You have a website, a blog, and a presence on social networking sites, such as FaceBook. Do you feel having an Internet presence helps spread the word about your writing?

I do feel that it has helped, although, to be honest, I'm sort of a techie geek and love to be on the computer so I'd probably do the website, blog, and Facebook stuff even if I wasn't a poet. Shameful secret: I learned to program video games in BASIC on my Dad's TRS-80 when I was six. So I don't really need an excuse to play around with technology. But if I did, I think that all writers who want to hear from their readers and peers should engage online. You'll get to know people who will never be able to attend one of your readings, whom you might never meet in person, so in that way it does extend your audience.

I do get quite a few e-mails from people who have found my work online and loved it, and I think the blog community has been very supportive. I've met a lot of people "online" and then read their work or met them in person, and was so thankful that they had a blog or website or posted on a discussion board, so I could discover their wonderful work.

On your website, you offer poetry consulting and editing services. What do you see as a common problem poets make in assembling collections?

I think it's hard for most writers (including me) to get enough distance from their own collections to really see what they are really about or what the collection is doing for the reader. What's the subtext? What's the arc? How are the poems related to one another in a larger sense? Sometimes when I read manuscripts I get interesting insights about the writer's personality, about what they choose to share with the world. That's the delightful, fun part of editing a manuscript. It's kind of like a makeover show in that way. Usually people have a bunch of great work put together in a not-so-great way. As an editor, I want to help people present their work in the most intelligent, interesting, dynamic way possible. Sometimes people put together great collections of individual poems with nothing coherent about the collection itself, just a ramshackle bunch of poems. Sometimes the manuscript is terrific and coherent, but the writer chose to put their weakest or most off-putting work first or last. Or they take ten pages to get to the real subject of the collection. Often, it's just a matter of cutting a few poems, a bit of rearrangement, and talking to the author about what they are trying to say with their manuscript and making them aware of their quirks and their strengths. Then, they're usually off and running.

You've been published widely. How do you go about submitting your work, including tracking where everything is?

In Seattle I had a group of poet friends who would meet and encourage each other to send stuff out, make goals, bring in copies of their favorite lit mags, that kind of thing. That was tremendously helpful. I also spent a year reviewing literary journals for NewPages.com, which was probably the best way ever to research a ton of literary magazines I might not ever have heard of otherwise. I encourage every aspiring poet to spend a year writing lit mag reviews for NewPages.com.

As far as nuts and bolts: I've used Writer's Market's online submission tracker, Dueotrope, and I have made my own Excel spreadsheet of poems to send out and where they've been sent. Even with all that, I still lose track once in a while, or receive a rejection or acceptance from a place I don't remember ever sending poems to. I blame my (evil and disorganized) alter ego.

In Becoming the Villainess, you have to get inside the skin of several characters. Did you find this tactic liberating as a writer?

When I first discovered persona poetry as a younger writer, I absolutely felt at home. Persona poetry allows poets to use fiction writers' tools without all the commitment of a novel! Character, plot, dialogue--and a wonderful liberation from "normalcy." I am a champion of persona poetry exercises for writers because often it requires the writer to make a leap in imagination--kind of the opposite of the old "write what you know" adage, instead "write what you can imagine"--and empathy. To write a good persona poem, a writer must develop a sense of empathy for the character they're writing about, go beyond "good" or "bad" to really identify with another person. In my case, embracing and then challenging the stereotypes about women in popular culture and mythology also allowed me to re-write stilted roles--busty superheroine, powerless princess, femme fatale, etc.--which was very satisfying.

Since you mentioned to me in an earlier e-mail that you're a "sort of comic book and sci-fi geek," I've just got to ask: Who would be the last person standing in a battle between Spider-Man, The Hulk, Batman, Superman, Catwoman, Wonder Woman, The Joker, Magneto, Wolverine, Storm, the Invisible Woman, Lex Luthor, James T. Kirk, Spock, Darth Maul, Obi Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Yoda, and Luke Skywalker?

Why does it always have to be fighting? Wonder Woman could use her "golden lasso of truth" and they could all get in a circle and talk about how it feels to be different--I mean, alien, mutant, evil genius--these are people that could use a little group therapy.

Seriously, though, Dr. Manhattan, of course. And maybe Dark Phoenix. They'd make a great couple, wouldn't they?

But my favorite comic book character right now is Joss Whedon's Fray.

Who are you currently reading?

I just finished The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a French novel I can't stop talking about because I love it so much. Philosophy, Japanese pop culture, action movies, class issues--it has it all! And I finally got to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which was brutal but fantastic.

As for poetry, I'm a frequent reviewer and so I'm knee-deep in new books! Suzanne Frishkorn's Lit Windowpane, Michelle Bitting's Good Friday Kiss, Jericho Brown's Please…I think that's just the top three on a stack about three feet high.

I also recently read Alicia Ostriker's book of essays, For the Love of God. There's an essay in there about Ecclesiastes that blows my mind every time I read it. And I loved Beth Ann Fennelly's Unmentionables and Rachel Zucker's Bad Wife Handbook so much I wrote an essay about them, which I am trying to find a home for.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to your fellow poets, what would it be?

Don't be afraid to write about the subjects you care most about; not every poem has to be about snow falling on an old farmhouse. Stick with your passions. Embrace your own special weirdness.

*****

To check out Jeannine Hall Gailey's website, go to www.webbish6.com.

For more information on Steel Toe Books, go to www.steeltoebooks.com.

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in an interview on this blog, click here to learn more about how to start that process.

Interview With Poet Suzanne Frischkorn

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 03:39:02 GMT

Suzanne Frischkorn gets to lead off the 2009 poet interviews on Poetic Asides. (Woo-hoo! Yay! Hurrah!)

I enjoyed reading Frischkorn's most recent--and first full length--collection, Lit Windowpane (Main Street Rag Publishing Company), for many reasons. First, the poems are "spare," which is a fancy way of saying they are unassuming poems that pack a punch. Second, the poems seem to communicate with each other throughout--making the whole even stronger than it's individual parts, which are doing fine on their own (many of them published in publications, such as Diode, MARGIE, and No Tell Motel).

Here's a personal favorite of mine from Lit Windowpane:

Ruin

In the spider and on the web. On the branch
and in the pothole. Yellowed grass, wilted
fern, blackened growth. On the skeletal
stems of black-eyed Susans and in dawn's
stretch. The glint of street lights. The sibilant
mulberry behind blinds. Empty sky. Listen
to these old windows,
how they lend themselves to rattle.

What are you currently up to?

I’m putting together a new collection of poems, working on some essays and editing the New Haven issue of Locuspoint.

Mary Oliver describes your writing as "select and elegant," while James Hoch says your writing is "spare." I noticed it, too. Is that sparseness something you consciously do with your writing?

No, when I begin writing a poem I don’t plan how that poem will end, what shape it will take, or set out for a particular style. I let the poem lead me.

How many drafts do your poems tend to make? And, do you think your poems go through more or less drafts now than when you first started getting published?

I revise a lot when I'm working on a poem, but I've never counted individual drafts, I know it's many -- many, many drafts. My writing process doesn’t seem to have changed with publication.

Many reviews mention your focus on nature in Lit Windowpane, but a lot of that nature seems focused on the water. Is there a reason for this?

Water is definitely one of the unifying elements of the book. I once read that your childhood landscape will always be your landscape no matter where you live in adulthood. After writing Lit Windowpane, I realize that's true. Most of my early childhood was spent on Miami Beach , and for many years I lived a short walk from Long Island Sound. The poems in the book were written after I had moved inland. In hindsight of course it’s obvious that I miss being close to the water.

Before Lit Windowpane, you published five chapbooks. What do you feel makes a good chapbook?

My favorite chapbooks have a focused theme, either through image, style, form, or any of the numerous ways to create a sequence of poems. I’m partial to the chapbook in any case, including the chapbook without a theme that gives a sample of the poet’s work. The bibliophile in me loves the chapbook as an art object.

You have a nice website that includes information about you, your collections, and readings. What function do you think a website should serve for a poet?

Thank you. A website allows a poet to have a web presence that’s current, directs those interested in her/his work to points of interest, and includes contact information. Basically it should function as a marketing tool.

You've been published in several journals. How do you handle submitting and tracking your submissions?

I tend to either submit a lot or not at all, meaning I’ll go through regular periods of sending my work out and then find I need a break from the administrative side of poetry. My submission tracking system is rudimentary, it’s usually a word document that lists the name of the journal, poems submitted, the date of submission, and a note on whether the journal accepts simultaneous submissions or not.

Who are you currently reading?

Jean Valentine and Ralph Angel.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

Read, read, read and read.

*****

To check out Suzanne's website, go to: http://www.suzannefrischkorn.net/

To check out Suzanne's publisher's website, go to: http://www.mainstreetrag.com/

*****

To learn how you, too, could possibly end up interviewed on this here blog, go to: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/Call+For+Poets.aspx

Interview With Poet Tom C. Hunley

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:22:46 GMT

I'm very pleased to share the following interview with Tom C. Hunley. Recently, Logan House released his third full-length collection, Octopus. He also published The Tongue (Wind Publications) and Still, There's a Glimmer (WordTech Editions) in 2004, in addition to three chapbook collections.

When he's not writing poetry, he's an assistant professor at Western Kentucky University and the director of Steel Toe Books. Plus, he never misses an opportunity to mention that he's a devoted husband to his wife Ralaina and doting father to Evan, Owen, and Blake.

Here's a poem from Octopus that I especially enjoyed (which Tom has pointed out was recently read by Garrison Keiller on October 26 at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2008/10/26):

The Dental Hygienist

She said "open up,"
so I showed her my teeth,
a chipped-white fence
that keeps my tongue penned in.

She rinsed my mouth.
She suctioned my cheek.

She said "How do you like this town?"
so I said "Mmpllff,"
though I meant "More every day,"

and she said "Gorgeous weather!"
so I said "Mmpllff"
though I meant "In my mouth?"

and she didn't say anything,
so I said "Mmpllff" and "Mmpllff"
though I'm not sure what I meant,
and she took me to mean
"Would you like to go out tonight?"
and "to an expensive restaurant?"

When I arrived with a bouquet of roses,
she stuffed them in my mouth.

She told me all about her feelings:
how she feels about fillings,
how she feels about failures.

She said "open up."
She said "It's like pulling teeth
trying to get men to talk about their feelings."

So I said "Mmpllff,"
though I meant "You smell prettier than the flowers in my mouth,"
and I said "Mmpllff,"
though I meant "I'm afraid of dying alone."

She said I was a good conversationalist
and showed me her perfect teeth.
I felt an ache in my jaw.
I felt drool crawling down my chin.

*****

And with that, let's get into the interview:

What are you currently up to?

When I'm not looking after my three small kids or my 85 not-so-small students, I'm mostly working on a poetry writing textbook tentatively titled The Poetry Gymnasium: Ninety-Five Poem-Strengthening Exercises. In my experience, most poetry writing textbooks treat exercises sort of as afterthoughts. My textbook-in-progress includes a clear learning objective for each exercise, a little historical background on the poetic subgenre the exercise aims to teach, a clear rationale for each particular exercise, model published poems, and poems written by my students using each exercise. It is the follow-up to my theoretical book, Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach, and like that book, it uses the five canons of classical rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) as an organizing principle. I've been at it for almost two years, and I hope to begin shopping it in a few months.

You're the director of Steel Toe Books and accept manuscripts during open submission periods. What's the most common mistake poets make when submitting?

Failing to follow guidelines. For example, in October we advertised an open reading period for predominately formal verse, but many poets sent us manuscripts that were written primarily in free verse.

In your opinion, what makes a good collection?

Arranging poems into a collection is a lot like arranging lines into a poem. I think there should be the same kind of movement, from problem to solution, from buildup to crescendo, from exposition to denouement, whatever it may be. I also find it helpful to think of a book as a concept album. I have an exercise in my textbook-in-process that asks students to analyze the way an album like Tommy or The Marshall Mathers LP or Electric Ladyland is organized. Why does one track follow the next? How would the album be enhanced or damaged if one song were moved or taken out? Then I ask them to discover an organizing principle and try applying it to a chapbook of their own poems.

Octopus won the 2007 Holland Prize from Logan House. Do you usually enter contests, wait for open submission periods, or take a by-any-means-necessary approach to shopping a completed manuscript?

I would like to see presses put more of their energies into sales and less of their energies into running contests. I would also like to see poets put their money into buying poetry books rather than spending it on contest fees.

My first two full-length collections, The Tongue and Still, There's a Glimmer, were both published in 2004 by presses that do not run contests (Wind Publications and WordTech Editions, respectively). I am grateful to those editors, Charlie Hughes at Wind and Kevin Walzer and Lori Jareo at WordTech, not only for publishing my books but also for teaching me a good deal about the business end small-press publishing.

I won Pecan Grove Press's chapbook contest for My Life as a Minor Character (2005). I submitted to them because I had heard good things about the editors, Palmer Hall and Louie Cortez, from a couple acquaintances who had published with them.

Then I entered the Holland Prize because I got a kick out of Logan House Press's web site (http://www.loganhousepress.com). I liked the fact that they once had an "Imagining Editor," rather than a managing editor (Jim Reese, who has since moved on). The current editors, cowboy poet JV Brummels and musician/book designer Eddie Elfers, are clearly enjoying what they're doing, which was evident from the web site. Also, I liked the fact that they sell books through a subscription service called the Live Poets Society, and I like the fact that everyone who enters the contest gets a copy of the winning book; that's a win-win for the published poet and for everyone who enters the contest.

Some of your poems in Octopus (such as "Ism-Ism" and "Interdisciplinary Studies") deal with big ideas in a pretty direct way. Such poems often run the risk of getting too abstract so that the reader is not drawn into the poem, but yours work. Why do you think yours do work?

First of all, thanks. I suppose the key is finding a good hook that gets both the writer and the reader into the poem. In both cases, I didn't start out with big ideas; I started with an image which I built on and riffed off until the big issues sort of emerged out of my unconscious.

Do you have any poetic pet peeves?

I don't like poems without any clear ideas, poems without any clear emotions, humorless poems, poems that pretend to be smarter or dumber than they are, poems that disdain their audiences, political poetry that puts politics first and poetry a distant second, religious poetry that puts religion first and poetry a distant second, or poems where the poet pretends to be taking great risks but is in fact preaching to some choir. That seems to be a long list, I know, but actually my tastes are pretty eclectic; I'm open to all sorts of poetry and I'm glad there's so much diversity of style.

Who are you currently reading?

As book review editor of Poemeleon, I'm currently reading Manthology, a

2006 University of Iowa Press gathering of both male and female poets discussing the male experience. There are great poems in it by Stephen Dunn, Jane Hirshfield, Sharon Doubiago, Norman Dubie, Jeffrey Harrison, and others. I also just finished Kim Addonizio's collection What Is This Thing Called Love, which is so beautiful and poignant and bluesy.

I just finished teaching A Confederacy of Dunces which I find brilliant and hilarious but which many of my students find annoying and confusing. I just began A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, and so far I'm enjoying its formal inventiveness while also finding deep, authentic feeling in it.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

Read as many other poets as you can. Buy their books. Get in touch with them. Learn from as many people as you can.

*****

To learn more about Tom C. Hunley, you can check out his bio through the Steel Toe Books website at http://www.wku.edu/~tom.hunley/steeltoebooks/.

And here are some of his poems found online:

* From Verse Daily

* From storySouth

* From Gumball Poetry

*****

And if you're a published poet looking for an interview opportunity, click here for more details.

Poet Interviews TOC

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:39:46 GMT

As many of you know, I've had the pleasure of interviewing several poets over the past year. To make it easier to check them out, here they are (listed in alphabetical order):

Bill Abbott
Nin Andrews
Julianna Baggott
Sandra Beasley
Helene Cardona
John M. Fitzgerald
Sheema Kalbasi
John Korn
Dorianne Laux
Diane Lockward
Tom Lombardo
Denise Low
Joseph Mills
Valerie Nieman
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Kevin Pilkington
Martha Silano
Anne Tardos
Jillian Weise

Interview With Poet Nin Andrews

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:43:24 GMT

I don't usually post interviews on back-to-back days, but I thought I'd make an exception in this case, because it might be the last interview posted until after November with this November PAD (poem-a-day) challenge coming up. And I'm just so excited to share Nin Andrews with anyone who hasn't read her work.

You see, there are poets who seek me out for interviews; there are poets who I seek for interviews; and then, there are cases where me and another poet just kind of bump into each other. In the case of Nin Andrews, I was definitely seeking her out after picking up (at random) one of her previous collections, Why They Grow Wings (Silverfish Review Press).

Since I'm an editor, I've always got more books than I can possibly read, but I was hooked from the first line of this--to me, anyway--previously unknown poet. After doing a little research, I learned she was not such an unknown quantity, in addition to learning--to my delight--that she recently released two other collections, Sleeping With Houdini (BOA Editions, Ltd.) and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? (Subito Press).

Here's a favorite of mine from Sleeping With Houdini:

Sleeping for Kafka

I heard on the radio this morning that prayers can heal. Experiments demonstrate that cancer patients who are prayed for, even by an anonymous person, have a better prognosis than those who receive no prayers.

A person can purchase prayers from Grace Church in Kansas by dialing 1-800-prayers. Visa and Mastercard are accepted.

I read that Kafka, a chronic insomniac, felt refreshed after watching his beloved sleep. Sometimes he invited her over, just to admire how she draped herself over his couch, wrapped in immaculate rest.

Some speculate it was the dreams of his beloved he wrote.

Thoughts like dreams drift from mind to mind. Some are heavy and sink to the ground or disappear under water where they grow like sea plants, while others are light and glide upwards like helium molecules.

When Jacob saw angels going up and down a ladder, they were merely tracing his thoughts.

Nietzsche said few people think their own thoughts. Instead they are thought. Many people are dreamt and prayed. They are like seashells inhabited by hermit crabs.

Most of us have no clue whose dream we are.

And with that, here is the interview:

What are you currently up to?

I'm working on two projects, one which I hope might become a New and Selected Orgasms. And another, which is a set of essays and longer prose poems that are very loosely linked by an economic theme. Or money. (I know it sounds boring, so I'm hoping that's not the case.) I was always told as a child not to talk about sex, politics, or money, and I always do what I am told not to do.

I've read that you grew up on a farm. How do you feel your childhood shaped you as a poet?

As a child, I spent a lot of time at the barn with the horses, cows, cats, and chickens. I also spent hours just staring at things—catching tadpoles, or watching ants pull crumbs or dead ants, or bees load up on pollen as they went from flower to flower. We didn't have a TV or neighbors or other forms of distraction, so I spent a lot of my time daydreaming. I think it's that empty space or time in my days I became used to as a kid that has shaped me most. It's the space I still need in order to write or solve problems or just stay sane.

In our correspondence, you mentioned that you've noticed a shift in your writing from more surreal work in your first collection (The Book of Orgasms) to more a storytelling style in your book due out next fall (Southern Comfort). Do you think there's a reasoning or natural progression behind moving from the surreal to storytelling?

I tend to do the opposite of what I am told. Write what you know, my first teachers suggested. But I have never been a big fan of reality. Reality feels like sandpaper on my skin. Sometimes I think I would love to escape the everyday world, and just move into the imagination forever. Music, philosophy, dance, poetry, painting – they all help me do just that. Like good drugs, they offer an alternative to reality. So initially I tried not to write my personal story.

But then, at a certain point, I started thinking about my childhood, and my children used to ask me about my past. And I would tell them stories. Stories about the time the one-armed man who worked on our farm shot a rabid fox. About the time the same man got drunk and let the heifers run loose on the freeway. About this crazy lady who came to the farm and taught me to see ghosts and read palms. Or about a man called Toby who would walk up the dirt road on bare feet some days, and then go down to the mud pond to catch snapping turtles. He said he caught them by feeling in the mud with his toes.

My children wanted me to tell these stories again and again, especially when I imitated the voices of the farmhands, my father, my mother, the crazy people, and the different animals and so on. They said I should write them down. But it's not easy for me to write about the farm. It's a bit like trying to break an ocean into drops. And of course, I don't have an ability to see these pieces objectively.

From your first collection to your most recent, you've written a lot of your poems in the prose format. What do you like about the prose poem?

In the beginning, I wanted to write carefully crafted mini-tales. And the prose poem is designed for that. After a while I became interested in all the ways a prose poem can borrow from other forms. So there are prose poems that are like fables, myths and parables, prose poems that are like interviews, love letters, fan letters, horoscopes, plays, advertisements, news reports, etc. There's so much versatility in the prose poem format. And great opportunities for humor.

Do you feel the structure of poems helps influence the content?

Yes. I think line breaks, for example, are content. The same poem written with line breaks and without them—can have an entirely different effect. And meaning.

I think choosing a form is like choosing a design for a house. If you have a big open space with skylights and a stage, that's one kind of experience. If you build a large house with a bazillion tiny rooms, that's another experience.

You mention that the poems in Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? are inspired by actual comments, notes and questions from your husband's students. Where do you find that you draw the line between reality and fantasy in your own poetry?

In most of my writing, I try to keep reality off-kilter somehow. To offer at least a tiny escape from reality. I do this in different ways, depending on the book. In Dear Professor, I use humor to create that escape.

In the orgasm poems, I am sometimes taking a literal reality and making it surreal. Or a philosophical discussion and putting it in an absurd context. I have, for example, an interview with an orgasm. That poem began when I saw the debate between Senator Bentsen and Senator Quayle. When Bentsen said: Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy, I imagined one orgasm saying to a fake orgasm, Orgasms are my friends. I know orgasms, and you? You're no orgasm.

In the southern poems, I mix up the characters, recast a father as a farmhand, an uncle as a father, my friend's mother as my own mother, so that I can gain some objectivity. I want each poem to speak for itself, not for my experience. A poem, I like to think, has its story to tell, its own truth.

The poems in Sleeping With Houdini seem very tightly wound together. When you're putting together a collection, do you start with an idea and start writing the poems to complete that idea? Or do you write poems and then fill the gaps after you notice a pattern developing?

I will write on one subject for months at a time. I end up with a heap of poems that cling to one another like static electricity. It's a nightmare to try to organize my obsessions. To try to make a pattern out of chaos. It's a little like attempting to take tiny pieces of old fabric and sew them into a beautiful dress.

Who are you currently reading?

I was just reading Shirley Jackson. She reminds me a little of my father, her dark sensibility. And Mark Halliday's new collection, Keep This Forever, which is as brilliant and smart-assed as Halliday always is. And The Lover by Duras, which is fabulous, of course. It's interesting, now that I think about it. All of these books are taking a bite out of my peace of mind. But they are all teaching me things.

I've also been reading Rick Bursky's The Soup of Something Missing, a little collection I think everyone should read. He's a poet I'm crazy about. And Carol Maldow's The Widening, a book about sexual awakening. She calls it a novel, but it's not. It reads like a memoir written in prose poems. Each page is a chapter. Each page is a beautiful prose poem.

If you had one piece of advice to share with other poets, what would it be?

I never follow advice, so I don't usually give any either.

For me writing is a little like keeping the barn clean. Every day I check over my work and see if there are any manure balls I need to remove. And every day there are. For sure. So I'm never surprised by a rejection. And I'm always amazed by an acceptance. That someone took something of mine, cow pies and all. So I'm grateful for even the tiniest forms of acceptance.

Not that that's advice. It's just the way I survive the poetry business side of being a poet. And how I keep writing.

*****

* Check out Nin's blog at http://ninandrewswriter.blogspot.com/

* Click here for more information on Sleeping With Houdini

Interview With Poet Tom Lombardo

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:05:38 GMT

Poetry is often at its best when it's helping readers gain greater insights into life. In the case of After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, edited by Tom Lombardo (Sante Lucia Books), poems have been chosen to help readers to recover from subjects such as war, abuse, addiction, death, and more. The anthology includes 115 poets from 15 nations, including Donald Hall, Thomas Lux, J.P. Dancing Bear, Annie Finch, Kevin Young, William Stafford, Mary Jo Bang, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Valerie Nieman, Rita Dove, and Jeffrey Levine.

Here's a poem by Lombardo himself that appears in the Recovery From Death of a Spouse section:

Daffodils

For weeks after Lana's funeral,
my mother cooked for me,
handled death's paperwork,
opened a door--
Look outside at your back yard.
Looking outward for the first time since burial
prayers, I saw daffodils blooming,
the ones that Lana and I had planted
in a sunken rectangular spot last Fall,
set against the bright, new green of Spring,
Easter white and careless yellow.

And with that, let's jump into the interview.

What are you currently up to?

In addition to my ongoing freelance medical editing, which pays my office rent, I am spending nearly all of my creative writing time on the marketing and promotion of After Shocks. I'm also in initial discussions with two authors and another publisher regarding potential next projects for Sante Lucia Books. Sorry to say, my own writing time has disappeared. I miss it, and I'll get back to it soon. I hope.

I also spend a lot of time with my two children, Lucy (12) and Sam (9). As a freelancer, I'm flexible enough to be Mr. Mom and pick them up after school each day, manage their afternoon activities and homework. My wife, Hope, has a real job, with a salary and benefits.

After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events is an anthology inspired by your experience as a widower. Could you speak a little about how this experience led to the anthology? Also, what do you hope this anthology is able to accomplish?

I've always hated that label "widower." I was so, so young when the label attached to me. I thought a widower should be in his 70s or 80s, some old guy walking with a cane, not a vigorous young man. I felt so out of place.

After my first wife, Lana, was killed in an auto accident on April 13, 1985, I found myself a widower in my early 30s, without peer among anyone I knew. Well-wishers offered condolences like this: "You’re young. You'll get over this." Or "You're too young, you'll never get over this."

I have spent the past two-plus decades coming to some understanding of my wife's death, my grief, and what recovery means in the context of my own life.

Reading poetry gave me solace during the early stages of my grief. I returned to some old favorites—Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost—not a particularly soothing group, you might say, but for me, they were familiar from a time in my life when my life seemed more settled. The language, the music, the ghosts in the haunted house offered an escape from a life seemingly shattered—an escape from "if…then", "what if ", "how", "why" questions plaguing my nights, questions that had no answers.

1985 was also the year of publication of Douglas Dunn's Elegies (Faber & Faber), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year. Sometime along the way, a dear friend gave me a copy, brought back from England. Though the circumstances of Leslie Balfour Dunn's death were quite different, I felt Dunn's world embrace me.

Grief wrongs us so. I stand, and wait, and cry

For the absurd forgiveness, not knowing why.

A decade later, Donald Hall's book Without, poems covering the illness and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, touched me in the same way.

These two books moved me deeply as books of recovery. They seemed direct, straightforward, and honest in their stories, emotion, and language.

Many contemporary poets are writing about topics in recovery. Mary Jo Bang's Elegy relives her grief over the death of her son. Linda McCarriston wrote Eva-Mary about growing up abused, which won the National Book Award. Sharon Olds wrote collections about childhood abuse and alcoholism. Others: Carolyn Forche, Bruce Weigl, Tess Gallagher, Marie Howe. Each poet has focused upon a topic of his or her own experience. They all represent a chorus of voices in a growing sub-genre of recovery poetry. I used a poem from Ms. Bang in After Shocks. The others will be considered for the second edition, due out in a couple of years.

What this anthology intends to do is show that the poetry of recovery cuts across many boundaries. What this anthology intends to accomplish is to provide its readers with a source of comfort in the language of poets who've experienced life-shattering events and have come to some kind of acceptance.

There are "115 poets from 15 nations" anthologized in After Shocks. How did you go about getting all the permissions? I'm guessing it must've been quite an undertaking.

You've heard the simile "it's like herding cats." The permissions effort for After Shocks was more than an undertaking. It became a lifestyle for several months. It took a great deal of organization, diligence, and guts. There were so many different pieces. But once I organized it in my own mind, the rest was just the grunt work of getting it done.

There are essentially two levels of permissions. The first level is the permissions from well-known, top-level poets with large corporate publishers, e.g. Donald Hall and Thomas Lux at Houghton Mifflin or Rita Dove at W.W. Norton, or Carol Ann Duffy at Faber & Faber, etc. Many of those very well-known poets have signed their rights over to their publishers, and those publishers re-sell the reprint rights, generally splitting the proceeds with the poet. In these cases, permissions became a matter of finding the permissions editor at the publisher, writing a letter, negotiating a fee, signing the contracts, sending a check. The process is well-defined, straightforward, and the permissions folks at these large publishers are professionals. They are eager to book the revenue from reprinted poems, for which you and I and they know that there's a very small market. So, in my case, as a very small publisher, the big houses were very easy to negotiate with. It was either give me a price I can afford or I walk, and if I walk, they get nothing.

I lost only one poem out of scores in this top level group. Only one publisher would not negotiate downward to a fee I felt I could afford.

The second level is essentially everyone else. Many of the poets at this level may have national profiles, many of them are well-known regionally, many of them are already award-winners. But their publishers are smaller houses than those large corporate publishers above and may not retain the re-print rights so that the author retains the rights, or if the publisher does retain the rights, it does not charge for reprints, or gives the poet the authority to grant the re-print rights. The process in these cases varies so much that it's virtually ad hoc. My approach was this: I emailed these poets, asked if they owned the rights to the poems I had selected for After Shocks. If they said YES, I took them at their word, and asked them to email permission, which they did. If they referred me to their publishers, then I emailed their publishers, and in almost all cases, received reprint permission via email free of charge. Most of the small publishers were cooperative, generous, easy to work with. Also in this second level, there were several contributors who submitted unpublished poems, so the permissions for those were very simple. The poets granted permissions. This second level was completed all via email. The first level was done all on paper, with letters and contracts and the good ol' United States Postal Service.

I must mention a few publishers like Alice James Books and Tupelo Press and Iris Press who were quite generous by not charging reprint fees when I asked for several poems from several of their poets' books. Working with editors like April Ossmann at Alice James and Jeffrey Levine at Tupelo and Bob Cumming at Iris was a pleasure. They are first-class editors, and they appreciate spreading their good poetry around.

On the other hand, there were a few small presses and university presses who were simply buttheads, refusing to negotiate or treating me with arrogance because I was not Norton or they believed I might be naïve or foolish enough to pay them exorbitant reprint fees. In four cases, I told the poets that I would not use their poems in the anthology because their publishers were not cooperating or were charging too much. In two of those cases, the poet's involvement broke the logjam. In the other two cases (both of them university presses), I lost the poems because the university presses were quite rigid with their reprint structure and refused to negotiate even a penny. So, in the end, I walked, and they got nothing. I felt this as a defeat because in the end, it was the poets who lost, not After Shocks. I had plenty of great poems in hand.

There was one other negotiated oddity in permissions. One university press would not negotiate a reduced fee, and when I told the poet, she offered to pay the fee. I refused to go along, but she was adamant. I probably should not have given in, but I agreed to pay half the fee, which actually brought my cost down within a comfortable range. She paid the other half. I really liked this poem, and I really needed it to balance out a chapter, so my editorial needs may have trumped ethics. I'm not sure that I'd do that again. It seems a bit unfair for a poet to pay her own press to buy reprint rights to one of her own poems. I'm not sure what the ethics of that situation dictate. Maybe I'll write this question to the New York Times ethics column, eh? As editor of Writer's Market, do you have an opinion on this?

All in all, the permissions work was time-consuming and tedious. But it was worth every drop of sweat.

Also, to put together an anthology such as this, you must do a lot of reading. What (or who) are some of your recent favorite reads?

During my reading and selection months, I was reading so much poetry I couldn't believe it. Morning, noon, and night poetry. I was dreaming about poems. But what a rewarding experience! I have met poets literally around the world.

In the U.S., Jericho Brown's just released collection, Please is excellent. He's a young, Cave Canem, emerging poet. Look out for this guy! I wouldn't have known of his new book had I not met him through the After Shocks submissions. He answered my call for submissions, placed on the Cave Canem web site, and we've kept in touch. Susan Meyers' collection Keep and Give Away, which won the South Carolina Book Award and the SIBA Book of the Year Award is also a great read and a fine example of the new poetry coming out in the South. Another book that caught my attention during my reading was Martha Collins' most recent one Blue Front, a book-length view of tragic events, with huge scope, set the microcosm of her family. Unfortunately, I couldn't excerpt it for After Shocks, though Ms. Collins did submit several other poems, of which I selected two. Another recent discovery is the poetry of Joseph Enzweiler, published by Iris Press of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He's a poet who lives near Fairbanks, Alaska, works half the year as a carpenter and stone mason, then as the long Arctic winter descends, he holes up in his primitive log cabin in Goldstream Valley north of Fairbanks and writes poetry on an old Royal Typewriter all winter long. And it's great stuff: deep, cold, brooding with insight! During selections, I read New Hampshire poet Pam Bernard's unpublished manuscript Blood Garden, a stunning real-time portrayal of her father's combat experience in World War I. Yes, WW ONE. He was an older father when Ms. Bernard was born. I selected a poem from the manuscript for After Shocks. Blood Garden is slated for publication by WordTech in 2010. Watch for it. It's another fine addition to the oeuvre of war poetry. I would also note Brian Turner's Here, Bullet (Alice James Book), which is by now quite well known, an excellent collection of war poetry informed by Turner's tour of duty in Iraq. One more—Isreali poet Rachel Tzvia Back's third collection On Ruins and Return, extraordinary, moving work steeped in the everyday activities of Israeli Jews and Arabs, living and dying side-by-side in Galilee.

There are four excellent collections from London publisher Ambit Books that I would call must-reads for any American poetry lover who would like to expand his/her reading into exciting new areas. This series is called Poets Here from Elsewhere and features four poets living in the U.K. who have left their homelands because of politics, persecution, or poverty. The books are Sir Winston Churchill Knew My Mother by Indian poet Satyendra Srivastava; Bells of Speech by Kurdish poet Nazand Begikhani, who fled Iraq after her brothers were killed in the chemical bombing of Halabja in 1988; memories of summers in brist near gradac and other poems by Bosnian poet Sonja Besford, who fled Bosnia after the civil war there, and A Day Within Days by Liu Hongbin, who was exiled from China when his poetry was posted around Tiananmen Square during the uprising there in 1989. All four of those books were written in English. I happened to be reading these four collections when I conceived After Shocks, and they opened the anthology's door to the world.

An excellent anthology that I came across during my reading, which I would highly recommend, again to expand beyond the normal reading a typical American reader usually gravitates toward: Six Basque Poets, published by Arc Publications in the U.K. It's phenomenal reading, with several excellent poets within, whom you would never, ever come across anywhere else. I found Bernardo Atxaga's poem "Death and the Zebras," and as I read it, felt shivers up and down my spine, and I knew I needed this poem as the final poem for After Shocks. The publisher, Arc Publications, was a nice discovery. It has several in its "Six Poets from…." series. Check out the web site. You won't be able to resist buying a couple.

Robert, I could go on and on. These are just a few of many, and I hate to call them out because there are others just as good. There are so many excellent poets out there whom I discovered during my reading, poets I never would have come across except for the submissions call. When you work on an anthology, you get exposed to many, many, MANY poets whom you'd never in your life expect to read. It's taught me to reach out further and further, open up to ALL poets, everywhere.

You're the founding editor-in-chief of Web MD, the world's most widely used health website, and you now work as a freelance medical editor. Does your background in medicine help inform your own writing or with compiling this anthology?

My own writing tends toward the body, the physical, sometimes even going inside the body to root around or look back out at the world from in there. My unpublished ms. has the working title The Body Functions. I'm not afraid to work with medical diction. I find there's a nice music to it when used in the right spot. I like to confront the diseases that break us down. I like to question the conventional wisdom. My approach, even in poems I've written about my first wife's death, uses stark clinical details. I feel that my 15 years of writing and editing health and medicine have given me some feeling for both the strength and fragility of this sack of bone and tissue we are blessed and cursed to live within. I think that experience colors about half of my published work, but there are other colors, tones, and moods in my work, too. I also was a scholarship college football player, and I've written some poems about all the concussions I suffered, kind of an interesting combination of medicine and athletics.

I'm certain my career as a medical editor informed the compilation of After Shocks. But there are no clinically descriptive poems in After Shocks. Where I believe it had an effect is that I have this sense of wonder when I look at us—human beings. I am attracted to poems that exhibit that same sense of wonder. We are truly a marvel. So fragile, yet so strong. The strength is not only physical. We possess a resilience within us that literally forces us to want to live. Of course, all forms of life possess this, don't they? Life wants to continue living, and life will alter itself to continue living. You can see this clearly in real time in viruses' behavior over their rapid generational evolution. Deadly viruses quickly evolve to lesser virulence so that they don't kill too many potential hosts, thus continuing their own source of livelihood. Once life takes root, it doesn't want to be uprooted. But we have something other life forms don't have…a big brain, the seat of a clever mind. Most of us use it to survive, no matter what horrors happen to us. Reading some of the poems in After Shocks makes me clearly understand that there truly are no limits to what we can survive. Just one chapter would illustrate this point: Recovery from Loss of Child. Reading the submissions for that chapter drove me to tears some days. I have children. I can't imagine the devastation of this loss. But these poets have survived what may be the worst loss of all. One of the forewords to After Shocks was written by therapist Nicholas Mazza, who lost his son in a car wreck. Dr. Mazza, who is editor of Journal of Poetry Therapy, writes: "Not a day goes by that I don't think of Chris or try to do something in remembrance of him…although there will always be an empty space on anything that I write, I remind myself that reflection can become remembrance, and this becomes a legacy for those who have gone before us. It is through poetry and story that we create meaning and form relationships."

Of course, a few of us are not equipped to survive, and those unfortunate ones choose to end their lives: facing illness, from grief, after abuse, fighting addiction. Who can blame them? It's hard and at times, can be hopeless. I've come to see that a life-shattering event has two outcomes: You either make it or you don't, and if you don't the alternative is the end of all hope. And a few of us go down that road. Fortunately, not that many. Most of us would rather continue living. Life wants to live. That's part of what I've learned as a medical editor.

So for After Shocks selections, I focused on that kernel of hope, that ray of recovery, that evidence that life wants to live. In some selections, it's in the air even as carnage surrounds the narrator. In others, it's years down the road from the event. But it's there, in each poem.

You self-published this book under Sante Lucia Books. Could you speak a little on why you decided to go this route? Also, do you plan on publishing more titles under this imprint in the future?

In one word, control. I'm glad I did it this way, because I was in total control the entire way. I had such a clear vision for what I wanted to do, had I gone with an established publisher, the publisher would have filtered my vision through its own. Compromises would have watered down my vision.

But I almost did go with a publisher. I came awfully close, and now, I know that it would have been exactly the wrong move. Publishers work more slowly than glaciers move. This anthology—388 pages, 152 poems, 115 poets, 15 nations—went from an idea to bound pages in 18 months. Triple that if a publisher is involved. Fugedaboudit!

There was a small, but well-respected, publishing house who had agreed to publish After Shocks. We reached a verbal agreement after a meeting on November 1, 2007, when I showed him an early draft of the manuscript. Then, I never heard back from that publisher again, even after repeated emails. He was so very enthusiastic, said a contract was coming. I've since heard a rumor that he has taken seriously ill or that his company may have taken seriously ill. He's elderly. Maybe he up and died? I mean, you think the worst when there's no communication.

When I didn't hear back, I moved ahead. I could not wait. I had a publishing date in mind, Autumn 2008, and I wanted to move quickly.

I had already formed Sante Lucia Books as a dba of the company I have for my freelance medical editing work, so I was prepared from the outset to do this alone, and I will freely and openly admit, I'm glad I did. I love to have complete and total control. I would drive any other publisher nuts. This is MY idea, and MY book, and I wanted to do it exactly MY way. I am already an editor, and a darn good one, so why would I need an editor from a publisher looking over my shoulder? On the publishing side, I'm learning a few things along the way, and I contracted with Kevin Watson, publisher at Press 53 in Winston-Salem, NC, to work with me on the design, production, and printing. I have absorbed a lot of marketing over the years, having been the creative partner with some great marketing minds during my career, so I'm familiar with marketing and publicity, so I felt somewhat equipped to work those angles. Some things I'm learning as I go, and they tend to be the lowest, but most unnerving, details. For example, After Shocks, the book, weighs 1 lb. 6 oz, in its bubble wrapped envelope. Well, your postman will not take anything heavier than 13 oz., because Homeland Security has deemed 13 oz. as the weight of a bomb that can bring down an airplane, according to my USPS carrier. What that means, in a practical sense, is that I must hand carry each and every book I mail to my post office in person, hand them over the counter, so they can be verified and stamped as "non-suspicious mail." And I discovered to my chagrin that not all postal clerks are trained to do that correctly, resulting in some copies bouncing back to me like rubber bombs, er balls. I feel like I'm a character in a Kafka novel when I carry these stacks of books to the PO. I can only carry two full boxes at a time without herniating a disc, so that means daily trips to the PO and waiting in line, which is one big, time consuming pain in the butt. Hey, would I avoid that with a big publisher taking over this anthology? You bet. But I still love it.

My imprint is named after my two children. Lucy, whose given name is Lucia, pronounced in the Italian way, loo-CHEE-ya, and Sam whose given name is Sante, pronounced in the Italian way, SAN-te. They didn't charge me a licensing fee, and for that I employ them as envelope labelers and stuffers, when they're not doing homework, playing hockey or tennis, or taking dance lessons, which seems like all the time. So, since the publication of After Shocks, I've been demoted from Editor to Mail Room Clerk!!! But I love it. I love having ALL the control over EVERYTHING. I embrace the mindless work of placing stamps and labels on envelopes. It's a nice break from reality.

Another publisher would have screwed this up somehow, taken two years longer, designed a lousy cover. I had, still have, a precise vision for this anthology, and I needed to execute that vision to the last dot on the page. For the good and the bad. Hey, there are three typos in the first printing, and those are completely my fault and have already been corrected in second printing. But any good that devolves from After Shocks, that's also my doing.

I wouldn't give up this much fun to a publisher for a million dollars. No way.

And, c'mon, realistically, is Norton or Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux or even Copper Canyon really going to want an anthology edited by someone not named Donald Hall or Louise Glück or Billy Collins or you-know-who-big-name in poetry? I'm not a twig from the Cambridge Tree.

Plans for the future for Sante Lucia Books? Yes. I have plans in the works. Yes. I will be publishing other titles in the future, but right now, I'd rather not discuss them in too much detail. I'm both superstitious and part Sicilian. If I don't jinx it by talking about it, then someone might steal the ideas. There may be a traditional collection or two in Sante Lucia Books' future. On the other hand, I have some intriguing ideas to explore vertical markets in poetry, which I don't believe have been explored by other publishers. My media experience tends to be non-traditional, outside-the-box work, so much of my planning for the future of Sante Lucia Books will be in this vein.

How have you gone about promoting this book?

I have this feeling that I am digging 10,000 holes. Most will be empty, but I will find gold at the bottom of three of them, and some others will have some loose change, lost and covered over by years of dirt.

Basically, I'm focusing marketing efforts on readings, personal appearances, and getting the book into the hands of every media outlet, editor, reviewer, producer that I can. I follow up on every single lead, every idea, every suggestion offered by anyone.

At the outset, I developed an extensive advertising plan and set aside a budget. However, I've scrapped that plan almost completely. Instead, I've spent the money on a book publicist, and a very good one, Marjory Wentworth. So far, it's working out well. Together, we've set up readings in Charleston, Charlotte, Atlanta, Boston. For the Charleston reading on September 18, Ms. Wentworth set up two live TV spots and an article in the Sunday arts section of the Charleston daily newspaper. The attendance at the reading was the largest for poetry ever at the library there. Eight After Shocks contributors from South Carolina read there. November 9 coming up: Charlotte. This has the makings of a very large reading. There will be 11 contributors reading. The local paper is planning an advance story. [note: I'll have more on this in a week or so…] We'll do the same for Atlanta on March 11, 2009, and Boston on May 2, 2009. We're looking to fill in the open dates with readings in other cities: SF/Portland/DC/NYC. We are scheduling readings where contributors tend to cluster in groups of 5 or more. I'm working with an agent in London to host a reading for the 10 British poets for sometime in 2009. I'll be heading a panel of contributors who will read their After Shocks work at the South Carolina Book Festival. I'm considering doing a panel at the AWP in Denver in 2010. There is a distinct marketing advantage to having 115 contributors. There are 115 potential sales people out there pulling for After Shocks. And they have been sending me some great ideas. And bless them all, they've been very willing to come to read whenever I've asked.

We've sent out a couple hundred books to reviewers and various media people. The results are just starting to materialize in coverage. Three newspaper articles so far. Those two TV appearances. I'll be doing an interview in November for Georgia Public Broadcasting, which will run twice, the second time right before the Atlanta reading. This, of course, is local, not national publicity, but it's a step in the right direction. Once into the NPR door, I hope to leverage to other NPR stations, and maybe, if lucky, to the national level. I have this gut feeling that After Shocks is just beginning to get some media traction. It's still early, as After Shocks has only been out for two months, but Ms. Wentworth and I have done everything we possibly could, and I feel that the results are just starting to come in.

I've been booked into 6 dates for readings/discussions at church-based recovery groups or adult Sunday schools (with book singings at the churches' bookstores), and this has been a surprising development. I'm going to push this as far as I can. I'll go to any church, temple, synagogue, or mosque that invites me, and I'm working to spread the word in that sphere. I'll need to tap into networks of pastors, ministers, priests, imams, and rabbis. I haven't yet cracked the code here, but I have a sense that religious institutions are going to become very important in the marketing effort. After Shocks is not a religious book by any means, but I'm hearing very strong reactions from clergy who've seen the book to its underlying theme of the resilience of the human spirit. These church-based readings/discussions take poetry out of the realm of the typical poetry audience and into the realm of people who might not read poetry that often, but might react to it emotionally as a spiritual experience. A strong selling point here, of course, is my own personal story. Ms. Wentworth has taught me to recognize the promotional value of that and to weave me and the book into one story. The National Association of Poetry Therapists has also been a strong supporter, using its email list to publicize readings.

Other publicity—you've graciously asked me to answer questions on this blog! Maybe there are other bloggers out there, too!

I may spring the money for an advertisement or two in the near future. I'm seriously considering a Poetry Daily sponsor box on its home page. The cost seems efficient for the reach. However, I'm not yet convinced that advertising results in sales. Readings, personal appearances, word-of-mouth definitely results in sales.

If you could pass on one piece of advice to poets, what would it be?

Keep at it. No matter what.

I rejected many good poems for After Shocks simply because there was insufficient space. I could have published a 500-page anthology. Editorial decisions do not necessarily reflect upon quality. Editors' preferences are as numerous as the stars. Keep searching the heavens for your star.

If you could pass on one piece of advice to people suffering from life shattering events, what would it be?

Recovery cannot be prescribed. There are no rubrics, no roadmaps, no matter how many books you read. Recovery is not bottled like cough medicine. I hesitate to give anyone direct advice on this, because events that shatter lives—death of a loved one, divorce, exile, acts of war, abuse, addiction, etc.—cause unquantifiable, huge amounts of stress and horror and doubt, especially right at the beginning. From my own experience and from a distance of 23 years, I can say that what helped me most is that I realized I had to embrace the pain, let it wash over me, invite it inside, make it a part of me. It's very difficult, but I've come to believe that the longer you fight it, the harder it's going to be to come to some sort of new balance. And recognize this: After such an event, you will never be the same person. That person who you were—is gone forever, so give up trying to get back to normal. Normal is going to be something new and different. Maybe not as good, but maybe better. But if you don't open up to it, the road is longer and more painful that it needs to be. I had expected to reach some closure at some point, but I have discovered that there is no closure. Not really. Recovery goes on forever. Recovery became part of my spirit, part of that new level of stasis, that new "normalcy." I'm 23 years out from the death of my first wife, and though I'm at peace with who I've become, I feel like I'm still recovering from that event. I still bear the mark of a widower. I have started a new marriage and we have two lovely children. I still think about Lana and experience grief in some form every day.

*****

For more information, check out www.poetryofrecovery.com.

Exclusive Interview With Poet Diane Lockward

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:07:41 GMT

Recently, it seemed as if a lot of the poetry I was reading had something to do with food, and today's interview subject played a significant role in me feeling that way. After all, Diane Lockward's most recent collection from Wind Publications is titled What Feeds Us (winner of the 2006 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize), which definitely feeds the senses and the soul.

Diane is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Eve's Red Dress (Wind Publications) and a chapbook, Against Perfection (Poets Forum Press). She is a former high school English teacher and runs an annual poetry festival in her home State of New Jersey.

Here's one of my favorites from What Feed Us:

Hurricane Season

Films of dense tissue swirling like storm clouds.
Specks of light inside, and at the center, a fibroid,
glistening like the lodestar that led the Wise Men
to Jesus. Microcalcification, cluster, fibroadenosis--
words with the force of hurricane winds--
cyst, lump, mass.

Warnings on the screen: a hurricane pounding
the coast. Isabel, like my friend's daughter.
People in North Carolina taping window panes,
boarding up homes. Wind so fierce it rips
a building from its foundation,
picks up a woman and hurls her onto concrete.

Ultrasound, MRI. A file on me now, stored
in a basement, as if I were a secret agent or a spy.
Words from a book on torture:
aspiration, fine needle, thick needle, core
biopsy, the rack of a stereotactic table. A list
of possibilities: stage 1, 2, 3, or 4;
mild pain, moderate pain, extreme pain.

A swath of heavy rain from Cape Fear
to the South Santee River. Whirling confusion
of sand pelting, cars fleeing. Radar. Doppler scan.
Category 5, 4, 3, 2. Satellite photos--
Isabel swirling, a mass on the screen,
eye at the center like a nipple.

Days of waiting for the phone to ring,
the hurricane coming closer and closer.
Days of wondering, How will I tell my daughter?
Waiting and waiting, braced for landfall.

Here's the interview:

What are you currently up to?

I'm zeroing in on the completion of a third book, patiently attempting to nurse into existence the handful of poems I need to flesh out the collection. This new collection began with an idea and the poems are kind of falling into place around that idea. This is a departure from the first two books where I was not aware of any connection among the poems as I wrote them, but once I had 50-55 poems that I thought were respectable, I gathered them together and found some unifying idea. So this time I'm working in the opposite direction. I wonder if that signifies anything?

In What Feeds Us, food plays an important role. Also, the body. Could you elaborate on what you were trying to accomplish with this collection?

The epigraph that precedes the poems really says what I had in mind. I took this from M.F.K. Fisher's book, The Gastronomical Me: ". . . there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers." The poems consider what nourishes us or fails to nourish us, what sustains us or doesn't. There is literal food, thus poems about fruits, vegetables, and pasta. There is family, thus poems about parents and children, both present and missing. There's love and sex, thus poems about the body and its various parts. There's fullness and its opposite, hunger.

Oddly, although I write a lot about food, I've always been a fussy eater. But perhaps that fussiness is at the heart of my obsession. When I got married, I vowed to love, honor, and never again eat liver.

As a follow-up question, what are your thoughts, in general, on the importance of food and body for poets? Do you feel diet and physical health influence poets' writing habits?

I think of food as a metaphor for the body. Just think how interchangeable the words are that we use to describe one or the other. For example, a tomato may be round, plump, luscious, full of seeds, ripe, firm, succulent, rotten at the center. Likewise a body. Sometimes when I talk about food, I am really talking about the body. For many of us, the body is a source of dissatisfaction, disappointment, fear, pain. Food can be a substitute for what the body is missing, for its unsatisfied longings. It can be the cause of physical ailments or it can help cure those ailments. Food is full of vitamins but also loaded with irony and thus rich with poetic potential. Certainly self-image and health affect our writing. I can't eat tomatoes, but I can write about my longing for them. I can't write well when I'm in a period of insomnia, but when I'm rested, I can write a poem about sleeplessness.

I noticed there was a business card tucked into the copy of What Feeds Us that I received. Do you feel business cards help with the promotion of the book?

The business card is the new beret. Seriously, most poets I know have a business card. Not that what we do has anything to do with the business world, but sometimes at a reading someone asks how I can be reached. The card contains contact information and is handy to give out. I really hadn't planned to have one, but I wanted postcards with my book's cover art to supplement the press release my publisher was sending out. So I uploaded the cover image to vistaprint.com—a wonderful service—and designed the postcard. Once I did that, I then received an offer from the company for companion business cards. The price was so reasonable I couldn't say no. I ordered 250 which I expect will be a lifetime supply. Do they help with the promotion of the book? I doubt that they directly affect sales, but I think they help with getting readings and workshops and those sell a few books.

You run an annual poetry festival in New Jersey. Could you talk a little about this event?

I've run this event for the past five years. I had an idea for a festival that would be a bit different from the poet-centered festival. I was thinking of one that would be journal-centered. My local library had just finished a big

expansion and put a note in their newsletter that they were interested in new programs. I pitched my idea and the librarians liked it. The first festival was a success, so it's become an annual event.

Each year I invite twelve editors to participate. The size of the festival is dictated by the size of the library, but I don't think I'd want it much bigger. Each journal is represented by two poets who are invited by the journal's editor. So we have twenty-four poets reading throughout the four-hour event. In a separate area the editors display their journals on tables and have submission guidelines and subscription forms.

Each year the word spreads and the festival gets better and better, now bringing in around 250 people. It's a festive and exciting day that pulls together editors, poets, and poetry lovers. The main focus is on the journals and the editors. The purpose of the event is to honor the editors who give us a place for our work and to thank them for the work they do in the service of poetry. No one gets paid, but poets do sell books. And lots of journals are sold.

The festival is also part of my larger mission to help build the audience for poetry. Whitman said, "To have great poets there must be great audiences too." I'd love to see similar festivals popping up across the country.

How important do you feel community is to poets?

I arrived at poetry late. By the time I found it, I had three kids and a full-time teaching job. No time for an MFA! Instead, I went to workshops and summer conferences. I took some courses at a nearby college. I went to readings and met other poets. I was getting my poetry education and, at the same time, becoming part of a poetry community.

I'm sure that most of my neighbors don't know I'm a poet. Perhaps they wonder what I do all day inside my house. I doubt they'd be terribly interested to know that I'm writing and reading poetry. So I've had to find people who are interested. I've been in a group for seven years, ever since I left full-time teaching. We meet at my house once a month. I also belong to a women poets' listserv. For the past three years I've run a three-day poetry retreat for six or seven women poets. We meet in a hotel at the Jersey shore and spend our time writing and reading poetry. I value the stimulation, feedback, and support other poets provide.

What (or who) are you currently reading?

I've been reading Lola Haskins' Desire Lines and Sheryl St. Germain's Let It Be a Dark Roux, both new and selected collections and both wonderful. Each poet has a hard edge and a passion that I really like. My kitchen table is a disgrace. I am always vowing to clear it off, but as soon as I do, more books come into the house. That table is piled up with books waiting for my attention. And I just returned from the Dodge Poetry Festival, so I have a plump list of books to order. Those are just the poetry books. I'm also finishing up Richard Russo's novel, Bridge of Sighs, and recently finished two nonfiction books, Donald Hall's The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon, and David Sheff's Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction, both heart-wrenching books.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

I'm not a minimalist, so I'll offer my three mantras: 1) Weird is good; embrace it. 2) Be alert. 3) Go forth boldly.

*****

Here are some links for more Diane Lockward:

* Website for her festival: http://dianelockward.com/fest8.html

* Diane's personal site: www.dianelockward.com

* Diane's blog: http://dianelockward.blogspot.com

*****

And if you're a poet or editor looking to get interviewed, find out more about how to go about doing that by clicking here.

Exclusive Interview With Poet Sheema Kalbasi!

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:46:38 GMT

Recently, I had the good opportunity to interview Iranian born poet Sheema Kalbasi who is also a human rights activist and translator. She's also the director of Dialogue of Nations through Poetry, director of the Iranian Women Poetry Project, and co-director of the Other Voices International Project.

Her collection Echoes in Exile (PRA Publications) was a Best Books Award Finalist by USA Book News. In addition to her own poetry, she also translated an anthology of women poets from Middle Ages Persia to Present Day Iran titled Seven Valleys of Love (PRA Publications).

One of my favorite pieces from Echoes in Exile is:

Ivy Nights

Deep in the mouth,
Ivies have grown.
It is rather tricky
To claim her as mine
Now that I have given her to you.
Take good care of her.

And here is the interview:

What are you currently up to?

I am working on the Danish to English translation of a poem by Pia Tafdrup for the forthcoming print publication of the Other Voices International Project, a collection of poems edited by my friend and literary colleague, Roger Humes, and myself. The anthology is the work by a number of poets from our UNESCO endorsed "cyber-anthology" of world poetry which is located at www.othervoicespoetry.org

You were born in Tehran, Iran; you are a Danish citizen; and you currently live in Washington, DC. How has your sense of place affected your writing?

Often when I am asked this question I reply by quoting from Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese poet and philosopher who writes: "He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty." As a person who has been displaced on more than one occasion living and experiencing life in places with such differences in the legal, social, and political system has definitely influenced my writings.

As a Danish citizen I have experienced social discrimination, but this is far from what I experienced and observed in Iran. The country where I was born and raised in until the age of fourteen is ruled by a regime that has institutionalized gender apartheid; has mass murdered dissidents and members of religious minorities; has destroyed holy sites and cemeteries of people of "unrecognized faith"; has denied higher education and work to Bahaies; has executed people by brutal methods such as stoning; and has arbitrarily arrested and jailed hundreds of journalists, bloggers, and other activists.

In the United States where I currently live, the rights of each individual are much more protected by the legal system than in any other country where I have lived. Surely, there are human rights abuses committed by the U.S. government from time to time, but those eventually always come to light. Abu Gharib is such an example.

In my writings I address these issues. I know what it is to be scared of falling bombs, as I know what it is to be paralyzed by fear. I experienced it at the age of 8 when several Iranian cities, including Tehran, were attacked by Iraqi missiles. The bombings killed some seventy elementary school students, and the air raid became the topic of one of my longer poems entitled "Let's Dance Cha, cha Oil," where I write: "The concentration of oil in my body is higher than Central Asia/And this makes it even more critical/To experience life/As a human with socialization goals/Because during the school hours/I and the other students had to learn/How to hide under the desks" (Echoes in Exile, P.R.A., 2006).

You are the director of the Iranian Women Project. What is the purpose of this project?

My mother's grave is in a new land far from where she was born, raised and worked. She was the first Iranian woman with whom I had contact, a lover of literature and willful creature who encouraged me to write as a child. I created this project to honor her memory so that she and other Iranian female poets living in Iran or elsewhere receive the international recognition they deserve.

You've worked as a translator. Do you feel the familiarity with multiple languages has enhanced your poetry writing?

Perhaps knowing several languages makes my poetry more inter-cultural and inter-textual without alienating or overshadowing my background both as an Iranian born, and a voyager.

In Seven Valleys of Love, you translate the works of women poets "from Middle Ages Persia to present day Iran." Did you notice any threads tying the poems together throughout the ages?

The thread tying the poems together is the anthology’s historical overview.

Your English-language collection Echoes in Exile contains poems of loss and pain, but also poems of desire. What do you feel ties this collection together?

My experiences as an individual, a woman, a lover, a human rights activist, a mother, and an exile.

Do you have any sort of writing routine?

Yes. I have disciplined myself to write every day. Sometimes I start as early as 5 a.m.

Which poets are you currently reading?

I am reading Fahmida Riaz, a Pakistani feminist poet, and of course one of my all time favorites whose poetry I can never get enough of, the Iranian-Canadian poet and filmmaker Naanaam (Hossein Martin Fazeli). Your readers may want to familiarize themselves with this poet's writings and watch one of his latest films at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=O02yAAmU3Ww.

If you could pass on one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

I don't like receiving advice when I haven't asked for any and don't see why other people, including poets, would be any different than me.

*****

For more information on Kalbasi, check out www.frontlist.org.

Exclusive Interview With Poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:27:29 GMT

One of the cool things about this blog is that very talented poets actually contact me about their poetry--either because they read the blog or are referred by their very talented poet friends. One such talented poet is Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who's the author of At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize, and Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book of the Year and the Global Filipino Award--both collections published by Tupelo Press. Aimee also has new poems appearing in Ploughshares, Antioch Review and American Poetry Review. She is an associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia.

Her work is detailed and often science-based, but there's also a sense of adventure, desire and love that helps make her writing both relevant and accessible at the same time. For instance, here is one of my favorite poems from her collection At the Drive-In Volcano:

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
The fear of long words

On the first day of classes, I secretly beg
my students, Don't be afraid of me. I know
my last name on your semester schedule

is chopped off or probably misspelled--
or both. I can't help it. I know the panic
of too many consonants rubbed up
against each other, no room for vowels

to fan some air into the room of a box
marked Instructor. You want something
to startle you? Try tapping the ball

of roots of a potted tomato plant
into your cupped hand one spring, only
to find a small black toad who kicks
and blinks his cold eye at you,

the sun, a gnat. Be afraid of the x-rays
for your teeth or lung. Pray for no
dark spots. You may have

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis:
coal lung. Be afraid of money spiders tiptoeing
across your face while you sleep on a sweet, fat couch.
But don't be afraid of me, my last name, what language

I speak or what accent dulls itself on my molars.
I will tell jokes, help you see the gleam
of the beak of a mohawked cockatiel. I will

lecture on luminescent sweeps of ocean, full of tiny
dinoflagellates oozing green light when disturbed.
I promise dark gatherings of toadfish and comical shrimp
just when you think you are alone, hoping to stay somehow afloat.

Here's the interview:

What are you currently up to?

I'm on sabbatical right now and last month I traveled to the Georgia Aquarium to fulfill a life-long dream/research project on whale sharks. I swam with four whale sharks and about 6,000 other fish, including a giant hammerhead. It was, to put it plainly--short of my wedding and the birth of my first child--the most exhilarating experience of my life. I'm working on an environmental children's book about the whale shark and a series of young adult poems. Meanwhile, it seems like I have been putting the finishing touches on my new manuscript for forever, but this time I mean it. This past summer, I had a mammoth 120+ page manuscript, so some serious slash-and-burn took place. My husband and I just bought a new house and we'll be moving in less than a month so I am also staring at various paint color chips scattered on my office floor.

At the Drive-In Volcano includes several references to location. So I'm wondering how important is location to your work?

I'm very particular when it comes to describing a landscape. For me, as both a reader and a writer, landscape is the very anchor (or at least one of them) for the whole poem to stand. Much of my writing comes from a life unsettled (having lived in seven different states since childhood) and to write about what a slice of land looks like or feels like is perhaps my way of mooring myself within the white space of a poem. The nature writer Gretel Erlich said that part of what helped shed her outsider status was to become a part of a place where "a person's life is a slow accumulation of days, seasons, and years, anchored by a land-bound sense of place." I have something very close to that "slow accumulation" here in Western NY, thank goodness, but at heart, there is still a wanderer in me.

Nature plays a role in the collection--from taking pictures next to volcanoes to taking the fins off sharks. Is science and the natural world a fascination of yours outside of writing?

One of the most common questions I get when I am a visiting writer is some variation of "Are the relationships/break-ups in your poems real?" My answer is that I can say that in poems that touch upon a romantic relationship, the biggest mistake one can make is assuming that the "I" of the poems is really me. I like to think of it as a composite or a sort of mosaic of a person, who just happens to have some similar qualities to me, but is not really me. But something that I'm very proud of content-wise, is that as you read through the book, you can be sure that any of the scientific or nature "trivia" found in my poems is all factually true. I didn't make up anything just for the sake of the poem, or because it 'sounded' better. So when I say in my poems that there is a wasp that can fly away holding a lizard in the clutches of its wee legs, or that when an octopus becomes stressed, it eats its own arms, I'm not just trying to conjure up some make-believe tra-la-la just to evoke a certain mood. Mother Nature is the greatest poet of all. I just take my cues from her. There's no way I could ever top the poems she gives us every single day. Just step outside and look around.

I read on your website that you have a dachshund named Villanelle. While reading your collection, I noticed you used the villanelle more than I'm used to seeing from other poets. Could you speak about both the villanelle and Villanelle?

The villanelle form is one of my favorite formal structures in poetry. I love to teach it, I love to write them. The repetition of the form lends itself to jumping in even deeper to an obsession. All the lines of the villanelles in my book are enjambed—that is, I don't actually repeat a complete line and barely even use the same rhyming word, unlike the 'traditional' villanelles in the vein of Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle," where whole lines are completely used again throughout the poem. People say an enjambed villanelle is more difficult to compose, but for me, finding a subject (let alone a line!) that bears repeating again and again is easier said than done. I adore puzzling through the possibilities of unexpected rhymes in the villanelle. Also? I love that the rhyme scheme is "aba aba aba aba aba abaa." Just saying it out loud cracks me up. As for my dachshund, Villanelle—she's taking an 'extended spa vacation' with my folks in Florida, as she did not take too kindly to a new baby in the house. But she has home-cooked (yes, I said cooked) meals from my mom and even though I miss her terribly, we visit often and she is generally living a glamorous life every dachshund dreams about. I almost named her "Strudel."

In the poem "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia," subtitled "The fear of long words," you write a reassuring poem to students about the length and spelling of your last name. Do you have a particular instance of a student having trouble with your name?

Oh, too many to mention in this space. I've had students say after the first day of classes that they were relieved because they thought I was going to be "one of them foreign guys who can't pronounce anything right." (Way to make a good first impression on your professor, no?) All during elementary school and high school, I felt like I had to explain so much of my culture to well-meaning friends and boyfriends. They knew I was American—had no accent whatsoever, but yet I was still different in lots of ways to them. It's funny, because my writing is still a lot of that "explaining" I think. Why I couldn't do this or that, why we eat this or that, etc. In the 70s, the pediatricians in Chicago (where I was born) routinely told immigrant families to teach children ENGLISH and only ENGLISH, else they would be ridiculed in school, etc. They really drilled this into my parents' minds, and even though my mom is a doctor herself, she was scared into following the orders. I wish I could hunt him down and slap him. I feel so cheated that I missed out on learning 2 beautiful languages: Tagalog and Malayalam. Never ever wanted to shorten my name. Even my husband didn't want me to take his name—he knows it is such a part of me that I would never want to lose. I think because my sister and I were raised in suburban neighborhoods where my family was the ONLY family of color, I was so used to having to 'explain' my (then) unusual packed lunches of lumpia and fried rice, etc. Or having fish for breakfast, etc. So I think in some ways, you could say I spent my whole childhood and teen years building a language that is accessible and vibrant. Poetry was finding its way through my everyday language before I ever knew what was going on.

Who are you currently reading?

My sabbatical reading list keeps getting longer, but the most recent reads include poet Paula Bohince whose new poems just blew me away, and a gaggle of children's literature to get a feel for what is out there as I work on my book on the whale shark. I am still plugging away on this almost 600-page long The Culinary History of Food. It's a veritable doorstop, but chock full of fascinating bits. It covers food culture in ancient hominids to the intricacies of canned food. I particularly found the section on medieval cooking to be a gas! I realize that those sentences make me sound like a huge nerd and you would be right to think so, but it's a must-read for any foodie. For fiction, I was a little late to the party, but I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road--as close to a masterpiece as I ever read. It's also the last book that made me cry.

If you could pass on one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Oh, I have lots of little morsels of advice: read often and a lot. Floss. Invest in a good pair of shoes and write letters more often. Listen to the paper take the ink when you sign your name.

Finally, and a little off topic, who's going to win the Big Game this year? Ohio State or Michigan?

Clearly, you did not do your research, Good Sir. The Buckeyes may have dashed the hearts of their fans to smithereens by getting obliterated by USC this month, but this is the Tressel era: OSU 35, UM 3.

*****

Apologies go out to any Michigan fans who (probably now formerly) read the blog, but I noticed that Aimee was a Buckeye fan, and while I'm moving to Georgia on Monday, I just had to get a prediction from a poet on how that game is going to go down. (Btw, any USC fans watch the game last night? Go Beavers!)

To find out more about Aimee and her work, I suggest checking out her website at www.aimeenez.net.

*****

Also, Tupelo Press, the publishers of Aimee's two collections, have a website at www.tupelopress.org.

Exclusive Interview With Poet and Attorney John M. FitzGerald

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:04:16 GMT

This interview came about from an earlier interview with poet and actress Hélène Cardona. Sometime in June, Hélène mentioned that John M. FitzGerald's most recent collection, Telling Time by the Shadows (Turning Point), was actually a collection of secret love poems written by him to her.

"These are the poems John wrote when we first met," says Hélène. "We met at a reading he did at Beyond Baroque in Venice. After that we communicated through poetry, sending each other poems by mail or e-mail for the longest time before we even had a date. It's a very 18th century story."

Needless to say, I was definitely intrigued. John originally sent his poems to Hélène as "prayer poems," so as not to let on they were to her. Eventually, the secret broke, and they both went on to live happily ever after.

FitzGerald, a dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, has published in numerous journals and anthologies. Spring Water, a novel in verse, was a Turning Point Books prize selection in 2005. His other collections include The Mind, The Charter of Effects, Question Creation and The Zeroth Law. He recently completed his first novel, Primate, and turned it into a screenplay.

Here's a poem from Telling Time by the Shadows:

"Magus"

I would be one of the wanderers,
with heaven watching.
Observe, you reflections, I glance away.

Notice the wonder spring forth in ancientness,
steep the spell held in spices, hypnotized.
In dreams I descend twenty steps at a time,

am afraid how I'll land if I fly too high.
I try not to say I, and claim myself,
a sign of consciousness uncovering.

Who calls me, from such transience?
We will ourselves into vastness,
like children at graves,

a wind with just one chance to blow,
both toward and away from itself in surprise,
or life is waste.

There are shooting stars, then that which lingers,
even hovers like a hawk, a halo, a messenger.
None can bear looking straight into the sun.

We see it reflect off the ocean by day, the moon at night.
Imagine someone's sun fly away.
What must it search for, in its burning?

Galaxies witness it bursting through silence.
May it hover to the end in spite of where it finds itself.
Let innocence cling to the universe, swirling,

get high and go hungry, distill our minds
till we can't control what pours from inside,
and at heart remain addicts, ever humble.

And with that, let's get into the interview:

What are you currently up to?

I recently finished a new manuscript of poetry, The Zeroth Law. It's actually more of a cross between poetry and literary nonfiction that compares the beliefs of the world’s major religions to history, myth and science.

You're in a relationship with poet Hélène Cardona. So I'm wondering if you could share what it's like to be in a relationship with another poet?

Hélène is great. She is the love of my life and my best friend and a pleasure to be around. People say we're joined at the hip. I'm not so sure that being in a relationship with another poet is so different than being in a relationship with a person in any other occupation. You have to make time for both the vocational and creative aspects of life, while continuing to recognize the things that brought you together in the first place. I was used to being alone to write and it took some adjustment for me. But it helps that we have a lot of the same interests and can bounce things off of one another. And it helps that she is brilliant, too.

Your collection Telling Time by the Shadows is actually a collection of "secret" love poems you wrote to Cardona, which you called Prayer Poems at the time. Could you re-cap a little on how this developed, including when/how Cardona finally learned their actual purpose?

Yes. It's a collection of poems of love and longing. I first met Hélène when she approached me after a reading I did at Beyond Baroque, in Venice . She told me how great my poems were, and of course, I was immediately stunned by her presence. As time went on, we kept meeting again and again at local poetry events. We talked and exchanged poems.

But Hélène is an impressive person. I was always certain that it was only the poetry she was interested in, rather than me in a romantic sense. We began to meet and take very long walks along the beach, from Santa Monica to Malibu , almost daily. During these walks we would hardly speak at all. We would then each return to our separate homes, and send each other poems and letters by e-mail and post.

At that time, as it happened, I was working on what I then referred to as "The Prayer Poems." These were prayers in the traditional sense, that they were directed toward a deity. But in these poems, God is really a woman.

In your own opinion, what makes for a good "secret" love poem?

I think a good secret love poem is one that is universal. You cannot give yourself away completely. Hélène actually began to hope the poems were about her.

You work as an attorney, which I'm sure eats up a lot of time and can be psychologically draining. How do you balance your poetry with your day job?

I write every night. It's just a matter of habit. I wouldn't feel normal if I didn't do it.

Could you explain what inspired Spring Water (Turning Point), a novel in verse about the life of a serial killer?

When I was in law school, I read a number of cases in criminal law and criminal procedure, in which defendants being tried for murder raised the defense of insanity, stating that God, or the devil had told them to kill. But the case that stuck with me the most did not arise in the context of crimes, but in the context of wills and trusts. It was the infamous Tylenol case, to which we now owe the tamper-proof cap.

In this sad case, a newlywed couple was called on their honeymoon in Hawaii , and informed that the groom's brother had suddenly and unexpectedly died. The couple cut their honeymoon short, and returned for the funeral. After the ceremony, there was a reception held at the home of the deceased. Both the new husband and wife took the very same Tylenol, and died within an hour of one another. Since they both had wills leaving everything to the other, the issue was which one to enforce. The killer was never caught. That really stuck with me.

You have lived in England , Italy , and Santa Monica . I'm going to put you on the spot and ask which is your favorite place to live and why?

Santa Monica . I love it here. I was born here. But I'm also a citizen of Ireland . I lived England 2 years and couldn't wait to come home. But now I sort of miss it, and will make it a point to go back – for a visit. My mother's side of the family has a vineyard in Amorosi, near Naples . It's pretty great there too. But since you said "live," I'm sticking with Santa Monica , for now. Who knows, I might feel the need to move to Ireland , depending on who wins the election.

As a follow-up question, do you think travel helps with the poetic writing process?

I'm sure that anything outside the ordinary, everyday experience must help with the creative process. As beautiful as Santa Monica is, you can only write about the beach so many times before you bore yourself to television.

If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?

Read, read, read.

*****

Check out Turning Point Books at http://www.turningpointbooks.com.

Check out John's website at http://jmfitzgerald.com.

And finally, check out Cardona's website at http://www.helenecardona.com.

*****

Poetic Asides is loaded with great poet interviews. To view them all, go to: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/CategoryView,category,Poet%20Interviews.aspx.

Exclusive Interview With Poet Sandra Beasley

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:48:40 GMT

This interview has been a work-in-progress since May of this year, even if Sandra Beasley wasn't in the loop on it. When I was in Los Angeles earlier this year for BookExpo America, I brought along a copy of Hotel Amerika for reading purposes and was floored by a poem about a translator by a poet I'd never heard of named Sandra Beasley. I even read that and another Beasley poem to my wife Tammy over the phone that same morning and mentioned that I need to hunt her down for an interview. But then I got busy and kept not getting around to it until Martha Silano mentioned Beasley in a recent Poetic Asides interview. That gave me the extra shove I needed, and so there's the history leading up to this posting.

Sandra Beasley won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize for her book Theories of Falling, selected by Marie Howe. It was released in April of this year by New Issues and has already received much praise. She received her MFA from American University and serves on the staff of The American Scholar. Beasley has also won numerous awards, including fellowships to Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Jenny McKean Moore Workshop, the Indiana University Writers' Conference, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Here's the opening poem to Theories of Falling, which was also cited by Martha Silano in her interview with Poetic Asides (and originally appeared in 32 Poems):

Cherry Tomatoes

Little bastards of vine.
Little demons by the pint.
Red eggs that never hatch,
just collapse and rot. When

my mom told me to gather
their grubby bodies
into my skirt, I'd cry. You
and your father, she'd chide--

the way, each time I kicked
and wailed against sailing,
my dad shook his head, said
You and your mother.

Now, a city girl, I ease one
loose from its siblings,
from its clear plastic coffin,
place it on my tongue.

Just to try. The smooth
surface resists, resists,
and erupts in my mouth:
seeds, juice, acid, blood

of a perfect household.
The way, when I finally
went sailing, my stomach
was rocked from inside

out. Little boat, big sea.
Handful of skinned sunsets.

*****

What are you currently up to?

As readers of my blog know, a few months back I began writing sestinas, invariably between the hours of midnight and 5 AM. I've always had a soft spot for the form, and the drafts were a way of giving myself a break from my second book manuscript. What started as mere linguistic jigsaw-puzzling has now taken on a life of its own: in October Black Warrior Review will publish Bitch and Brew, all sestinas, as part of their chapbook series. So now I am putting together two manuscripts—one in free verse, I Was the Jukebox, and a formal one called (for now) Count the Waves. Both will circulate to publishers beginning this fall.

I've lived in DC since coming up for my MFA at American University , and I grew up in northern Virginia . This is home. So I've taken on service commitments to the Writer's Center, and the Arts Club of Washington, to host readings and improve outreach. There's something immensely satisfying to me about connecting people with common goals and a love of poetry. I've also been thrilled to start contributing to my hometown paper, the Washington Post, as a periodic columnist for their "XX Files" feature in the Sunday Magazine.

You've had fellowships to Vermont Studio Center , Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Jenny McKean Moore Workshop, the Indiana University Writers' Conference, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. First, what's your secret to success? Second, how have these fellowships benefited you and your work?

A lot of the opportunities I have had come from just putting stamps on envelopes and getting the darn applications out there. Relentlessly, and with cavalier disregard of the (many, many) rejections that will come your way (or at least, they come my way). You have to make the system as assembly line as possible—go ahead and prepare a generic bio note, c.v., cover letter, project description—though, of course, tailor to the individual application before you send.

Whenever I get the slightest inclination to actually fill out an application (or for that matter, send out a journal submission), I drop whatever else I'm doing and honor the impulse. Even if I'm at work. Even if I'm on deadline. You always have to prioritize the poetry, because no one will do it for you.

Theories of Falling was pretty much born at the Millay Colony—at least twenty of the pages were written there, and I moved thumb-tacked copies around on the wall of my studio until I found the manuscript's order. I love a colony atmosphere: the escape from the city to a rural setting; interaction with fellow artists (painters tend to be my favorites); the fact that you can spend a day going barefoot, reading, and drinking red wine, and that's accepted as part of the process. I would be a colony-hopper if I didn't love DC so much.

Do you have any sort of routine to both your writing and submission efforts?

I try to be as systematic as possible in terms of sending out, by conceptualizing "submission packets" of 4-5 poems each: poems that offset each other well, that advance a certain theme or stylistic gesture. I'll match a packet with whatever I think the editors at that particular magazine will like best. It makes me nervous if I don't have things out at at least three journals at any given time. As you can probably guess from that statement, I prefer places that consider simultaneous submissions. As someone who has worked at a number of magazines, I just don't see any reason not to be open to simultaneous.

As for a routine to my writing schedule…can't say I have one. Sometimes I draft every day for a month, sometimes I go three months without writing a thing. Mostly I draft on my laptop, but I use longhand and legal pads too. I like a variety of settings, so I might start work in my downstairs studio and then move to my bedroom rocking chair; sometimes I write on the balcony, sometimes in a bar. I am 100% night owl, though, and would happily always write between midnight and 3 AM. It's a shame that schedule isn't compatible with the rest of the world.

The poems in Theories of Falling often feel embedded in relationships, either between family members or lovers. Do you find digging into relationships makes for more engaging reading?

Mining what's around you is practically inevitable, particularly for the first book. Young writers have been using the same bildungsroman arc since the days of the German enlightenment, and one of the things you hear over and over in MFA programs—"write what you know"—does nothing to challenge that. Which is just fine, as long as the craft is there and the writer has the discipline to then move on. I love Theories of Falling, but it would be a disappointment if I were digging into those same emotional dynamics three books from now. You do what you can with the material, and then you find something new.

Included in Theories of Falling is "Allergy Girl," a long poem (or series of poems?), about your real-life experiences growing up with chronic and severe food allergies. Could you discuss your feelings on how autobiographical you like to make your poems?

"Allergy Girl" offers the most-straight fact of anything in the book. I'd feel comfortable calling them autobiographical, which I would hesitate to do for any other poems. I think fidelity to fact in poetry is overrated, a belief that is to the unending consternation of my loved ones. Poets are always heightening and fracturing facts to get at a lyric or philosophical "truth." But judging from reader response—and when the book came out, I heard over and over about this series in particular —it is useful for the "Allergy Girl" poems to be understood as "truthful," because they offer perspective on a medical condition that might be of comfort or liberation to someone else trying to write about their health issues. Plus, how could I pass up the chance to say yes, I really was the girl in that bed-of-nails episode of Mondo Magic?

My new work is flagrantly un-biographical, playing with persona and surrealism. The jukebox speaks. The orchid speaks. The world war speaks. I go on blind dates with dead Greek heroes. My family much prefers these poems.

You recently hosted a poetry reading in your apartment. An interview you conducted with Henry Taylor while you were at the University of Virginia led to you being invited to get your MFA at American University . How important do you feel community is for a poet?

I respect the specter of the hermit-poet, who does not want to do any meeting or greeting. But I can't empathize at all, and there is a very proud tradition of poets who cultivate community. Henry Taylor fits that mold, as does Ethelbert Miller here in DC, or Lisa Spaar at the University of Virginia . So often we send our work off into the void, publishing in little journals no one ever sees. If I can make the void a little less echo-ey, whether by hosting readings in my living room or introducing people, I will. And I wouldn't give up those 3 AM conversations on the last night of the AWP conference for anything.

You have a very nice website and blog. What do you see as the main benefits of having these?

Honestly? My website started because of "Sandra Beasley and the Spaz Rats," my internet doppelganger who is a renowned expert on alternative medicine for rodents. I am not making this up. Her name was already all over the web, and I knew unless I actively established my own identity, there were going to be some confused Googlers in the poetry world. So I use a very rudimentary WYSIWYG editor, and try to update the site two times a month with readings and recent publications. I haven't gotten any inquiries about using magnets to treat a rat with a sprained ankle, so I guess my initial goal has been met.

The blog began on a whim, because the aforementioned very rudimentary HTML editor makes casual website updates a pain. I wanted to be able to easily post news, random thoughts in the first person, snapshots of inspiring visual art, etc. It amazes me that totally organic, active, palpable communities of poet-bloggers have formed just in the last three years. In most cases I have "met" poets I never would have known otherwise, leading to some invaluable connections in the real world at conferences or colonies. In some cases fellow bloggers are local folk that I never get a chance to see; at least we can keep tabs on each other, and trade a periodic encouraging note.

Who are you currently reading?

I came back from the July Sewanee Writer's Conference with a stack of books by fellow participants. Fiction by Margo Rabb and Jason Ockert; poetry by Cecily Parks , Katrina Vandenberg, Kimberly Johnson, Philip White. Mark Strand's essays on the paintings of Edward Hopper. And, um, eight more. Outside those: Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse, by Darcie Dennigan—that is what I am literally reading this second, and it is knocking my socks off. Also sestinas, wherever I can find them.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Read your contemporary poets, ideally in the venue of literary journals. That's where the heart of today's work is beating. So often poets decide a particular school is "not my thing" based not on what this generation is doing with the tenets of that school, but based on what the canonical style has been. The poetry world should be a lot more permeable than that.

*****

For a lot more on Sandra Beasley, including information on her book Theories of Falling, her blog, other interviews, reviews, etc., I suggest you check out her website at www.sandrabeasley.com.

Exclusive Interview With Poet and Visual Artist Anne Tardos

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:13:10 GMT

Anne Tardos was not looking for me; I was not looking for her; but we met on the miracle of social networking known as Facebook, because I like to add poet friends from time to time. After Anne accepted my request, I checked out her profile and her website. Then, I requested a copy of her most recent collection I Am You (Salt Publishing), and the rest is, well, this interview, I guess.

For a little background on Tardos, she is a poet and visual artist. In addition to I Am You, Tardos authored five other books, including Uxudo (O Books/Tuumba) and The Dik-dik's Solitude: New & Selected Works (Granary).

The thing that appeals to me most in I Am You is Tardos' balancing act between serious emotion and playfulness with language. Here are four parts of a 100-part poem by Tardos called "Letting Go" (from I Am You):

AND WHY IS everybody a monster?

Is it because it's monstrous not to be happy?

Even to be hungry and masticating and digesting strikes me as
monstrous

The monster father's ghost, hidden inside my monstrous
psyche

I demand to be loved
I make it a condition
This too is monstrous

"Pull down thy vanity
I say pull down."

To find lightness

Then you take a deep breath. (You might as well do it right
now.)

20.

I CAN'T LET go of my constant companion
the iPod
it tells me exactly what I want to hear
Whispering it into either ear

All it needs is some of my power

I have enough to spare
Too much for some
Hardly any
in reality

Those who fear my power would fear anything

But enough of scary monsters hiding under the bed already

21.

DO NOT LET go of the swift instinct of self-preservation, the
deepest of all the automatic instincts.

A certain blind pathetic forcefulness of life.

One meaning blotting out another.

Friendship exactly.

A certain quickness of impatience.

And now, in a world gone gray and baboon-like, you made
everything baboon-horrible with your baboon lips and
grimaces.

22.

LET GO OF the growing process and watch the withering

As all of this unfolds
I am losing love and gaining like

If you've been adored as a small child, you would probably
understand

It is the child who is unfaithful
radical and daily transformations followed by eventual
departure

A man who fulfills all the needs and forgives all the faults
lover, friend, teacher, son, and grandmother.

What luxurious protection love has offered
Love means "I'm not only yours, I am you. I shall live for you."

Our cat Roof
lived for us

She lived exactly as long as was required.

If indeed it is an ending.

What are you currently up to?

You know, that’s exactly the question I ask myself almost every morning. What am I up to? As a matter of fact, I began a painting yesterday. A self portrait. I’m bound to return to it today and see what I’m up to, besides gazing at myself.

More importantly perhaps, I’m also trying to finish a new long poem in progress, entitled “E-rotica.” I hope the summer will give me a few quiet days in which to do this work. The other project is an extension of E-rotica, and has the poetic and idealistic worktitle “The Pure of Heart.”

And for my bread, hardly any butter, I’m still indexing The Nation, something I’ve been doing for years.

I Am You collects three poems dealing with the loss of your husband, Jackson Mac Low. How did you go about writing on a subject that had to have been very traumatic and close to home? Were there special challenges you found in this collection?

Actually, the book collects five new poems, practically everything I’ve written since Jackson’s death. And saying that the book deals with the death of my husband is a narrow view of the book as a whole. Sure, it deals with the loss, inevitably, but it deals with so much more. The notion of flexible subjectivities is one of the book’s primary concerns.

Some aspects of the book are inevitably elegiac, but that’s just a fraction, a background for the emotional push that occasioned the writing of the work. Inevitably, once your spouse dies, and as in Jackson’s case, dies after a long illness, your time suddenly frees up. The first thing I did was to edit a book of Jackson’s, Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, that the University of California Press published earlier this year. They did a wonderful job. Soon after that, I Am You came out from Salt Publishing.

In the 100-part poem “Letting Go,” there is a line: “Love means ‘I’m not only yours, I am you. I shall live for you.’” Do you find that dealing with the loss of a loved one means you have to let go a part of yourself? Kind of like a part of yourself dies, too?

Indeed, I always felt that part of me died with Jackson, but at the same time, part of him has stayed alive with me, so this huge transformation could also be seen as a kind of tradeoff. Needless to say, I preferred our earlier state, but a death is also a valuable lesson in non-attachment and the ever shifting nature of the universe.

When I wrote “Love means I’m not only yours, I am you,” which also gave me the title of the book, I made the observation of the melting together of two individuals. Aside from the obvious implications of empathy and compassion in that phrase, the origin of it was a realization I had many years ago, when Jackson and I went to visit the Guggenheim museum, and decided to go off on our own, viewing the exhibit at different speeds. After a while I was ready to join him again, but couldn’t find him. I looked long and hard inside that large tube that Frank Lloyd Wright had built for the Guggenheims, and started panicking a bit, not seeing Jackson anywhere. When I finally did spot him across the gap and on a different level, I said to myself outloud “There I am!” I meant to say “There he is!” but this mistake made me think about having one’s place with or near another human being, and having one’s identity merge with that of the beloved.

In fact, what’s interesting about all this is that when Jackson died, my identity, the Anne Tardos seen through his eyes, also ceased to exist. The daily mirror he presented me with, his view of me, had gone. So in fact, we do become each other in a long-term relationship.

I’m struck by how a lot of your work incorporates images. Is there a particular reason behind doing this?

I’ve always worked with images. Just as I juxtapose disparate linguistic elements, I also include images as a challenge to a text, in the sense that the inclusion of an image on a page of text will inevitably alter the nature of the text. How this happens is what I play with by including various images, mostly of animals—my pet subjects. Another reason might be that my academic background is in the visual arts, film, video, painting and sculpture.

As a follow-up question, how do you go about choosing the images you incorporate into your poetry?

It varies. I rarely set out to look for an illustration of what I’ve written, rather I look at images all the time, make them or capture them, just as I read texts, think about them, take notes, grow from them. Similarly, an image that I’ve been looking at will find its way onto a page of text I’m working on. I might just try and see how the words and the image go together, and from there I continue the exploration until I establish some balance between the two elements. In I Am You, I’ve used fewer images than in my earlier works, as well as fewer multilingual elements. This was in no way premeditated, and may change. My approach to poetry is intuitive, within certain formal guidelines and boundaries that I set up for myself. You could call what I do direct writing or intuitive composition.

You have a handle on multiple languages. Do you feel this helps or hinders the poetic process?

I speak, read and write four languages. I grew up in different European countries and acquired, in that order, French, Hungarian, German, and finally English. The presence of these languages in my mind has been the foundation of my multilingual writing. The threshold to cross was always the letting go of, the dropping of any segregation between the languages, and allowing them to emerge within my text as they would naturally, unhindered by linguistic identification. This process led to many linguistic puns and abstractions. I can’t see my knowledge of other languages as anything but helpful, never a hindrance.

What and who are you currently reading?

What am I currently not reading may be easier to answer. I find myself avoiding fiction, which is a new thing. I used to delight in good novels, but these days, I read more poetry and philosophy. For my poem-in-progress, “E-rotica,” I read Hindu erotology, medical texts, pornography, the classics and the various Anonymi. I have not dealt with images yet, and may very likely forego including images with this particular subject. But that’s not a final word, so we’ll see. When the right image comes along, I’ll know it.

If you could only pass on one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Try to be clear in your intentions, in your statements. Step back a lot, like a painter does. Leave the room, think about the poem, or don’t think about it, and then come back to it. Read it outloud.

*****

Check out Anne's website at www.annetardos.com.

Also, you can find some of her readings and performances at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Tardos.html.

To learn more about the collection I Am You (including ordering information and a head shot of Anne), check out the Salt Publishing website.

Exclusive Interview With Poet Martha Silano

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:00:35 GMT

Some of the poets I've interviewed for this blog were sought out by me; some have been recommended by other poets; and some have come to me on their own. In the case of Martha Silano, author of Blue Positive (Steel Toe Books, 2006), it was kind of a combination of these events.

In my interview with Julianna Baggott, Martha Silano was mentioned as a new poet she took a shining to. I started to check out Martha's work, but then I got sidetracked on some other projects. Next thing I know, Martha is introducing herself and mentioning that Julianna sent her in the direction of my blog--and would I be interested in interviewing her? Anyway, one thing led to another, and wow! Silano is a great new (to me, at least) poet.

There are many excellent poems in Silano's Blue Positive collection, but the one that really grabs me is the following:

Harborview

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me
--Sylvia Plath

By the roots of my hair, by the reinforced elastic
of my floral Bravado bra, by the fraying strands

of my blue-checked briefs, some god's gotten hold of me,
some god's squeezed hard the spit-up rag of my soul, rung me

like the little girl who rang our doorbell on Halloween, took
our M&Ms is your baby okay? Why did they take him away?

Some god's got me thinking my milk's poison, unfit
for a hungry child, some god's got me pacing,

set me flying like the black felt bats dangling
in the hall, some god so that now I can't trust my best friend's

healing hands, the Phad Thai she's spooning beside the rice (ditto
to the meds the doctors say will help me sleep) Poison poison!

as if the god who's got hold of me doesn't want me
well, doesn't want my rapid-fire brain to slow,

wants this ride for as long as it lasts, wants to take it
to its over-Niagara-in-a-barrel end, which is where

this god is taking me, one rung at a time, one ambulance,
one EMT strapping me in, throwing me off this earth,

cuz I've not only killed my son but a heap of others too.
Some god's got me by my shiny golden locks, by my milk-

leaking breasts, got me in this hospital, wisps like white scarves
circling my head, wisps the voices of men back to bed you whore!

Some god till I'm believing I've been shot, guts dribbling out,
till I'm sure I've ridden all over town in a spaceship, sure

I'm dead, a ghost, a smoldering corpse, though not before I'm holding up
a shaking wall, urging the others to help me (a plane about to land

on our heads), though soon enough thrown down by two night nurses,
strapped to a bed, though for weeks the flowers my in-laws sent

charred at the tips (having been to hell and back), clang of pots,
hissing shower, the two blue pills my roommate left in the sink,

all signals of doom, though some god got hold of me,
shook and shook me long and hard, she also brought me back.

And with that, let's get into the interview.

What are you currently up to?

I'm working on a book of poems--it's almost finished, I hope--tentatively titled The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception. It's about this mother who gets knocked up, considers fleeing, fights with her husband, almost gets a divorce, has the baby, gets seriously depressed, and continuously (alternately) screams at and revels in/adores her two children. Betcha can't wait to read it!

I've also recently begun a series of poems (I would like it to be a chapbook) about body parts. And I'm working on another full-length collection about space aliens, extra-terrestrials, Galileo, ants, space junk, the universe, and related subjects--but this one probably won't really get going till my youngest starts kindergarten, when I plan to apply to every writer's colony in the country.

I recently read in an interview that you had to suffer through postpartum psychosis to write your collection Blue Positive. Could you elaborate on that experience? For instance, I'm interested in how it affected your daily life and whether you were still able to write, etc., as you went through postpartum. Also, I'm wondering how it was initially detected.

Oh gosh, that's a big question. Thanks for being bold enough to ask it. I've encapsulated what happened during those first six months of my son's life in two essays; one appears in the April ’08 issue of Redbook, the other in Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness and the Creative Process, just out from Hopkins U. Press.

Let's just say my daily life was quite different. I don't remember much about the first week at all; I was actively psychotic--hallucinations, delusions, the whole kit and kaboodle. I mean, I thought I was in cahoots with the Unibomber. When the drugs put a stop to the active psychosis, I was left with paranoia, extreme insecurity, acute anxiety, agoraphobia, and severe depression. "Writing" consisted of scribbling down a few notes about the guy down the hallway who was out to get me. When I got home from the hospital I was still in pretty bad shape--afraid to venture down to the basement, take my son on a walk. I was also prone to gut-wrenching panic attacks. Worst of all, I'd forgotten how to laugh. I remember going to see the movie Best in Show, and not being able to figure out what was so funny (I saw it a year later and laughed my ass off).

As far as the detection issue, that was pretty much a comedy of errors. After my first panic attack (ahem, slip into psychosis), I was diagnosed with sleep deprivation and given a prescription for tranquilizers, which I never took because, of course, the doctors were trying to poison me. The next time I got hauled into Behavioral Health they finally began calling what I had postpartum depression (semi-true) and put me on antidepressants, the worst thing you can give to someone who's manic. Three cheers for modern medicine! The Paxil actually sped up the process from mania into full-blown psychosis, landing me in the ER that much faster.

More doctors and nurses are beginning to understand there's a connection between the postpartum period and bipolar disorder, but in the year 2000, at Harborview Medical Center, in the very progressive city of Seattle, I was treated like a "crazy person," not a new mom suffering from PPP. For instance, I got a wicked urinary tract infection because my hoo-ha was still bleeding and they didn't remind me to take my requisite daily sitz baths.

The collection Blue Positive seems to me to be a collection celebrating life--it covers topics such as sex, pregnancy, motherhood, and food. How did you go about assembling the poems that would go into this collection?

I hadn't thought of Blue Positive as a particularly celebratory book, but—psychosis be damned!—it's quite a mirthful romp, isn't it?

The oldest poem is "Salvaging Must Lead to Salvation"--an I-want-to-get-married piece I began in 1998. For months I was writing these pathetic (very ordinary) little square-shaped poems that were going nowhere, and then it was like the levee broke and this voice came out--not quite "me," more this potty-mouthed gal who both thoroughly adores and completely despises this man she's going to end up marrying. I knew this poem didn't fit with the manuscript I was sending out at the time (What the Truth Tastes Like), so I guess it's when I knew I had another book in me—always a relief.

Then I got hitched, knocked up, and wrote all the preggy poems ("Getting Kicked by a Fetus," "What they Don't Tell You About the Ninth Month," etc.). Then I thought the book was done (2000), and sent it out to a dozen or more places the week before I went into labor with my son. What a joke! When I "came to" after my 6-month trip through crazy-land, I realized, duh, I had actually only written a 1/4 of a book--okay, 1/2 at best. So I kept writing, and of course all the poems were now about being a mother--"While He Naps," "Explaining Current Events to a One-Year Old," "His Favorite Color is Green," etc. Urged by a friend, I sent a revised version off to the National Poetry Series; it was chosen as a finalist.

Once I knew I'd even slightly enticed a neutral reader (i.e., not my mom or sister), I kept adding, cutting, and shaping. It took two more years to (1) write the title poem; (2) figure out that I needed to begin the book with my own childhood, then move chronologically through adolescence, courtship, marriage, pregnancy, and the birth of our son; and (3) be awarded an 8-month writing residency in the wilds of southern Oregon’s Rogue River canyon, so I could get knocked up again and write the thirteen poems that close the book. And that's how it finally got finished.

Motherhood factors into a lot of your poems. How do you work in time to write around being a mother and teaching? Do you have a writing routine--or just write when you can?

Oh, goodness, I envy those people who can write whenever they want. But actually I was always poor with time management. I like rearranging junk drawers, pouring over old photos, gabbing, etc. So it's actually turned out that I write more now than ever. But okay, here's a little secret: self-imposed writing retreats. I've done three in the last year. The first two were paid for by a grant (thank you, Washington State Artist Trust), but the most recent one cost me less than $100--two nights in a friend of a friend's beachfront studio. It didn't have a stove or a bed (I slept on the floor), but hell if I cared.

Otherwise, I write when I can: on the kitchen floor while my 3 year old plays with her dinosaurs, at the dentist's office, in traffic (yes, in a moving car), at the beach, on airplanes and on fishing docks, during snack time, while they're sleeping; in between all the rest.

How do you decide where to submit? Do you have a particular process for deciding where to submit and when your poems are ready to go out?

Under most circumstances I don't send to a place unless I’ve read a back issue/perused their online offerings or am a subscriber.
I've gotta mostly completely love the poems, the fiction, the art work, the layout, the whole shebang, or no thanks.
I avoid submitting to mags where I don't have a prayer (I'm not talking long shots, I'm talking completely different aesthetic).
When a poem is getting close to feeling finished, I email it to a poet/editor friend or two, just to make sure I'm not about to make a total fool of myself. If I skip this step, and sometimes I do, it feels risky, sorta cocky--I mean, how the hell do I know? I've sent things out too early--who hasn't?--but mostly I try to sit on my hands as long as I can, even if it feels like a poem is finished. I can't always wait a year, but usually a month or two at the very minimum allows me to find all the stupid little mistakes, OR to realize the poem is actually a piece of sh*t.

I've enjoyed reading your Blue Positive blog where you deal in equal parts personal and poetic. What are your thoughts on blogging in relation to your writing? Would you recommend blogging to other poets?

I can't say I recommend blogging, though it IS a blast. It might be keeping me away from the real writing, but so far it hasn't interfered much. I like writing about magazines and writers I'm stoked about, asking questions, sharing personal stuff that's not quite poem-worthy, keeping my prose muscles toned. I really haven't thought about whether it's beneficial to my writing in any way; it's just stuff I would have told a friend or written in my journal, so why not put it out there? It reminds me a little of being a DJ at a tiny college radio station in Iowa. I would say these outlandish things, make little jokes, purposely mess up the PSAs--probably only a few cows were listening, but that was half the fun of it.

Could you name a couple poets you're currently enjoying? And why you're enjoying them?

The hard part is keeping it down to a couple. Here’s five:

Heidi Lynn Staples—wacky, wild, mind-blowing leaps;
Matthea Harvey—startling line breaks and imagery, lots of surprises;
Jenny Browne—I love how her poems are both grounded and surreal;
Sandra Beasley—oh man, has she ever changed how I see the world, but especially cherry tomatoes;
Lee Upton—her music is sump.tu.ous. Here’s a gal who knows how to edit down to the bone.

As mentioned earlier, you teach English at two community colleges. Do you feel teaching has helped or hindered your writing?

My students bring satchels and satchels of enthusiasm, excitement, and adrenaline into my life--our conversations wind me up and set me spinning. I love holding back on what I think and instead asking more questions. I love how they talk to each other, teach each other, teach me. Without them, would I still be writing? I grow old; they stay young. I grow set in my ways; they kick me in the pants. It's an incredible honor to teach, a calling, really. If I didn't love it, if it didn't feed my creativity, I wouldn't do it. So, the short answer: helped.

If you could impart only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Ignore all oracles.
Don’t be too cocky or too humble.
Figure out the poems you were given to write, and get to it.
When an established writer gives you the critique you begged for, listen carefully and do your best to keep mum.

*****

To find out more about Martha Silano, check out her website at http://www.marthasilano.com/.

The site includes poems from her collections Blue Positive and What the Truth Tastes Like (Nightshade Press, 1999), as well as ordering information.

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in setting up an interview (or just a poetry lover, who wants to make a recommendation), then check out my Call for Poets. It worked for Martha Silano, and it could work for you.

Exclusive Interview With Poet Laureate Denise Low!

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:26:06 GMT

Wow! What a weekend! I celebrated with 30th birthday with my sons, announced my engagement to poet Tammy F. Trendle, and completed an interview with the poet laureate of Kansas: Denise Low. (So yeah, 30's getting off to a great start!)

Yes, Denise Low agreed to answer a few questions for the Poetic Asides blog, which is quite an honor when you consider everything else she's currently up to:

Working on a new collection of poetry/prose on the theme of ghost stories set in the west, "so there are settler, American Indian, and contemporary ghosts to consider, including William Burroughs and William Stafford."
Working on an inter-genre project of text, paintings by Paul Hotvedt, and video by Joshua Kendall, with packaging by Deborah Dillon. "This is based on three years of Paul's seasonal plein air paintings."
Working with Mohamad El Hodiri, "one of my hometown buddies," on translating poetry by Mohamed Afifi Matar, a leading Egyptian poet.
Releasing (through Backwaters Press) a collection of her literary essays about contemporary Great Plains writers.

Low also mentions, "I should also comment on a failed project: I was working on a collection of poems about birds--working down my Audubon check-off list plus observing the Kansas area birds. I just could not pull it off! About half of the poems never developed beyond journal observation. I am proud of myself for recognizing when to let go."

Learning to let go of a great idea that's just not working (and shows no signs of doing so) is a great lesson for any poet. But we're not letting go of Low just yet. Here's a little Q&A first:

You're the poet laureate of Kansas. So, what it's like being a State Poet Laureate?

Being poet laureate has helped me in so many ways. I can now articulate more clearly how my role as a poet is community-based. All poets are advocates for the arts. All poets work with a centuries-old tradition of wisdom. We add our own pieces to that tradition, from our time, and that great river keeps flowing forward. As a poet laureate, I have become more excited about younger poets and their upcoming roles of spokespersons for their generations. All poets are revolutionaries, creating “it” new each morning.

Does being a poet laureate make it any more difficult to find time to write?

This position, truly, has given me more opportunities to travel, which has inspired new writing. Also, the honor has given me confidence. I appreciate the state of Kansas for this public support of an art form that is sometimes ridiculed. Thirty-eight states now have poets laureate. So the appearances have been more inspiring than detrimental. I am glad that at this time in my life, I have no serious family obligations. I went into the position with the understanding that it would take up most of my free time, and it has. Nonetheless, ideas keep coming to me, and they find form on paper.

Your blog covers events and poets from the Kansas and Kansas City region. How important do you feel it is for a poet's development to become a part of the poetry community on a local level?

As poets, I believe we speak for our time and our generation. I think it is very important to understand our historic contexts. As I have researched local history and my family genealogy, which includes settler and some Indigenous [Lenape (Delaware) and Cherokee] heritage, I have come to understand the unspoken influences on my poetry—my dialect, my attunement to space, my education, my religions. I look to peer poets, whether I read them or hear their performances, for an understanding of how I fit into the community and how I do not. I think it is very important for poets to be aware of those subliminal influences. Our communities help us stay in touch with what is original and what is cliché. And finally, poetry is community based. We write for an audience, I believe, even if it is a disembodied part of ourselves. Very few poets write and are content to put the manuscripts into a shoebox. Most wish to be heard/read and understood.

I found your poem "Thailand Journal: Message from Cambodia" in a back issue of Coal City Review. In the poem, the narrator discusses her son's journeys, touching on the communication and distance between a mother and her grown son. Could you talk a little about this poem? For instance, I'm interested in whether this poem is autobiographical.

That poem is indeed autobiographical. I have two wonderful sons and a dear stepdaughter. I try not to embarrass them too much, but indeed son Daniel lived in Thailand almost three years. He is fluent in Thai. It was an experience of the “beginner’s mind” of Buddhism for me to visit him and experience total role reversal. This was not what I expected from my first journey to another country—something so primal. For the poet who writes autobiographically, I believe that the challenge is to find the unexpected, not the ordinary details of a person’s life. So this took me by surprise.

There is another poem dedicated to my other son, that is a twin experience for me, as I felt the surprise of our ongoing relationship:

Whale Watching: Farallon Islands

Now my grown son is a well known

stranger. We go whale watching

together, close again as we were

when he was small and never

left my side. Whales swim

in family groups. From the boat

we see two adults, their spray

smelling of sea-plants.

They steer through waves and dive,

spotted flukes the last sign

before they disappear. We lower

binoculars and I sense

underwater movements like giants

rumbling through a cavern.

The ship monitor shows knolls

below, in a rocky landscape.

The boat motor is too loud

to talk over but we wait together

until they rise to the surface and blow

exhaled breath alongside

and again the grassy smell.

The procession of behemoths

meanders, and our wooden boat follows,

slapping swells, an awkward cousin,

clumsy on the ceiling of their world.

As a follow-up, that poem deals specifically with communication. Do you feel communication is an important purpose of poetry?

My mentor Carolyn Doty, a novelist, always stressed that a writer’s first duty is to communicate. I believe that. We can free write or develop elaborate mental air castles—but language, by its nature, puts us into communication with other folks. The first rule, then, is: be understood.

What and who are you currently reading?

I just finished Amy Bloom’s Away. I loved her sense of fluid time and her skill in creating it. I am reading Carlos Castaneda’s The Fire from Within—I am interested in his idea of “assemblage points”—which are like set points for perceptions of realities. I just finished Diane Glancy’s book of poetry Asylum in the Grasslands. She uses such fine, strong imagery. I recently read Eric Gansworth’s A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function: Poems and Paintings, which is based on Onondaga beadwork concepts, and it is a remarkable achivement. Next up, as far as poetry books, are Jim Spurr’s Open Mike Thursday Night—he’s an Oklahoma poet—and Airs & Voices: Poems by Paula Bonnell, from BookMark Press. I read a few poems already and loved them. There is so much to read and so little time!

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

I appreciate Paul Muldoon’s answer to that question when he visited Lawrence lately—remain humble. Be open. I understand that to mean that receptivity allows for authentic poetry. Okay, second piece of advice: read as much as you can. And I appreciate this chance to be part of your project!

*****

To check out Denise Low's blog, go to http://deniselow.blogspot.com/. It's great for all lovers of poetry, but especially those from the Great Plains.

*****

Also, here's a cool, little thread I found on Poets.org where it appears Denise answered some forum questions on that site: http://www.poets.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14960.

This thread includes the interview and some more examples of her poetry.

*****

To check out other poet interviews on Poetic Asides, go to: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/CategoryView,category,Poet%20Interviews.aspx

In there, you'll find interviews with poets, such as Dorianne Laux, Jillian Weise, Joseph Mills, John Korn, Helene Cardona, Julianna Baggott, and more!

Exclusive Interview With Poet John Korn

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:32:19 GMT

Totally unrelated, but my oldest son is today 1 year older: That's right, he's 7 years old today. Go Benjamin!

*****

Okay, I've known John Korn for a few years now through online social networks--we first met on MySpace. I've always enjoyed his words and his sincerity as a person. So when he mentioned he was coming out with his first collection Television Farm (A Menendez Publication), I wanted to use it as an excuse to pick his brain about poetry--from the perspective of an up and comer.

Here's a John Korn poem I was lucky enough to publish in my (now defunct) online journal Faulty Mindbomb: http://faultymindbomb.blogspot.com/2007/01/fmb0002.html

What are you currently up to?

I have an interesting job. It is required of me to communicate with people who suffer from mental illnesses and encourage them to accomplish goals. I’m not saying I’m good at my job but I think a lot of the energy I once put into poetry is now being used here. As far as writing goes I am very interested in writing stories eventually. I’m also interested in digital filmmaking on a very low (maybe appropriately no) budget level. I have an idea for a series of poems taking place in a small city which I‘d like to be a small book.

How did this collection come about?

There are many moments which have lead to having this book being published. In short, when I began writing and posting my poems a woman named Didi Menendez began contacting me. She published me in her online magazine MiPOesias. After some time she began to do print issues as well as books. She eventually asked me to put a book together. She was very patient in that she let me take my time putting it in order. Didi is very active and creative with her magazine. There are also many interesting pod casts on her site. Didi is also a great poet and recently has been churning out paintings like a machine.

Who (or what) do you consider to be the biggest influence on your writing?

There are a number of things and people that influence/influenced me. I will just mention a few poets. Ron Androla was a big influence. I was writing mostly stories before, or trying to. I never really cared much for poetry. I had liked Bukowski as a teen and Edgar Allen Poe before that, but I never was captivated by poetry enough to want to write it. I had read others, but even still I didn’t really care or never found anything that really hooked me. Not that I didn’t enjoy poetry or appreciate it. I just didn’t crave it or want to write it. Ron had such a unique voice that was very new to me and seemed (and is) timeless. The range of emotion, thoughts, and imagination that was being expressed really moved me. He would paint a slice of ordinary life with a simplicity that I found beautiful, and then paint a very surreal manic landscape that was severe and dark. I found his voice to be intelligent, compassionate, and sometimes murderous. I loved it. Also his language was unlike anything I had read. It was addictive. I couldn’t read just one poem, I would read a series of his. There seemed to be a lot of experimentation in his poems, or that he had gone through much experimentation to get to the voice he had. I began to imitate that voice, I think. Eventually maybe I tried to come up with my own. Around the same time I began listening to early Bob Dylan. It was very exciting to have those two voices echoing down the hallways of my mind.

Also, I began reading a young lady’s blog. She wrote many poems there. She’s one of the people I dedicated the book to. Like many poets, much of her words seemed to be scathing reviews of people and their behavior. I guess you can call them “put down” poems which I see a lot of. Though there was something different about hers. She seemed to be compassionate about her subjects. She wasn’t ridiculing people seemingly to make herself seem like the “wise” poet, or to write them off to stroke her own ego. Which is very tempting to do in poetry. It was more like she was trying to reach the people she was talking to in the poem to have them come to their senses. She often seemed to be asking her subjects to offer her the same in return. She was very graphic and creative with imagery with a dark tone which I love. I began to write her and eventually talk to her on the phone. I was not surprised when she told me that many of her poems were spawned from things she wanted to say to various people that were her friends. She also didn’t seem to be concerned about being published. What drove her to write seemed to be the need to express something she could not bring herself to do in a social situation. She didn’t sound like any of the other poets I was skimming through with the same types of blogs. She didn’t seem too concerned about impressing any group although she accepted praise and asked for criticism. There’s a kind of faith there. Faith in what she was doing.

As with Ron, she had an interesting language. Two very different poets but the approach and attitude seemed similar. She was experimenting. Technically she would mold her poems with different styles that I found impressive considering that when I was the same age I could not do what she was doing. With both poets mentioned there was not just style but strong content. I guess many poets probably approach their work in this way. It can simply be that some poets moved me where others did not. These two did. Albert Huffstickler and Stephen Dobyns are two others that really grabbed me. For basically the same reasons. Currently I’ve finally read some Walt Whitman and got the same spark. These are the kind of writers that would motivate and influence me to write to the point where I was ecstatic about it.

Do you spend a lot of time on revision?

Oh yes. Although I tend to shape the poems in appearance to not have a specific shape. If I had a typewriter or wrote my poems out longhand with a pen, it would really show how much I rearrange, cut out, and put in. There would be piles of crinkled paper. I tend to write long poems, but if I didn’t revise they would be three times as long. I wrote mostly on a computer which makes it easier to do this, because often I would change the poem before I brought it to a close. Going back to it later, sometimes months or a year, I will change things, even if only a word or two. When I had a blog, I often put up things rather quickly. It did not bother me so much if there were typos. With the book I went back and cleaned up. It was tedious at times.

Much of your poetry seems to describe people and how they interact. Do you intentionally try to do this?

Well, there are certainly intentional things I try to do in a poem. Since communication and interaction in various forms is something that fascinates me and I often want to explore this artistically, then yes, I intentionally do this. Though I can’t recall ever sitting down and telling myself, “Okay now I’m going to write a poem conveying how people interact.” It is something that I just naturally gravitate to.

I guess the idea of a farm that grows televisions can be all about interaction. I day dreamed that image while listening to a piece of music that was very soothing. I imagined a field at dusk. Then I began to imagine spots of colored light pushing up out of the ground. Eventually it became apparent that the spots of light were televisions growing and breaking though the dirt like pumpkins or watermelons. Immediately after this I imagined a young man and woman walking through these rows of TVs and touching them. When they touched the TVs the screens would flicker images as a reaction.

You asked if I drew the cover and I did not. My friend Jeremy Baum did. He read my poem and asked if he could draw a picture for it. I was excited to see his interpretation of it because he can effectively create surreal landscapes. I liked his vision and asked if I could use it for the cover. Unfortunately, though, I forgot to put his name in the book. Sorry Jeremy.

As a follow up question, is your poetry more influenced by fiction or reality? Or a blending of the two?

Both. There are poems in the book which are completely nonfiction.

"The Bridges in West Virginia Look Like Spider Webs" for example is a poem that is completely true about a drive I took through that state with some friends. In this case my imagination was very active that night, so my reality of that moment was influenced by fiction and fantasy. Taking a nap during that drive and having a vividly strange dream added to the experience. In other poems, the actual event was not so fantastic until I sat down to write it. In those cases the telling of it was influenced by fiction.

I will often fit a few actual experiences into a poem though they happened at different times. Other poems are just made up though always seem influenced by an actual experience. To me it really doesn’t seem to matter. It seems to me that our reality is very influenced by make-believe, and make-believe is constantly trying to mimic reality. The two seem constantly entwined and both are revealing of the other.

Do you have any specific things you try to avoid in your own writing?

I have not been writing as intensely as I was with the poems in this book. I can recall sitting down and certainly being conscious of avoiding something, though not conscious enough to know specifically what I was trying to avoid. Looking back I think one thing I tried not to do was to have a voice that sounded like a guy straining to sound like a profound poet. When I read poetry I consider to be not interesting or moving, it always seems that the poet is trying to sound too much like a poet. I may be failing in my explanation of this, but hopefully you get the idea. I don’t think I’ve always succeeded in this, but I found it very important to avoid it as best I could.

Also, when I write I often have an imaginary audience in my head that I am writing to. I tried to avoid having my audience be made up of poets. Like I mentioned poetry was rarely an interest of mine. So, in turn, it was rarely my interest to want to write poems aimed towards poets. To me, when this is done, it becomes like a language shared only between poets. I’m not so interested in that. I wanted to be more accessible to others. That does not mean dumbing down your poetry by any means. To try and interact with different people with different perceptions and convey an image or thought to them that they could relate to and hopefully provoke thought or emotion. I liked the idea of attracting even one reader that may not normally be so interested in poetry. It was something that I kept in mind to make the experience of writing poetry a mostly happy and interesting one. Even if I failed it doesn’t matter because it was what motivated me to experiment and keep up the practice at that time. Though, obviously, when the poem is complete the first person you want to take it to is a poet or someone who is familiar with poetry so you can get some feedback.

If you were to impart one piece of wisdom to another poet, what would it be?

I would most likely send them in the direction of another poet. The obvious “wisdom” is to read and write. Whatever you are looking to do in writing you cannot start until you begin this.

*****

Click here to check out John Korn's Television Farm.

*****

Check out a painting of John Korn here.

Self-publishing & slamming: an interview with poet Bill Abbott

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:36:40 GMT

Everything interests me. Tornadoes, politics, pop culture, computers, wildlife, domesticated life, etc. Pick a topic, and I'd love to learn more about it. As such, I set up this interview with Bill Abbott, who is a poet with a long history of involvement in slam poetry and self-publishing his own poetry. And I'll be the first to admit that I'm not too "cutting edge" on either topic.

So this interview was set up with the hopes of educating myself as much as anyone else. Hopefully, other poets get some useful information as well. I know I learned quite a bit from Bill, who recently published a history of The Southern Fried Poetry Slam from the years of 1992-2000 called Let Them Eat Moon Pie! (from The Wordsmith Press). It's filled with stats, photos, quotes, history, and more. He's also self-published seven books of poetry. In addition to his involvement with Southern Fried, Bill also created and hosted the Rust Belt Regional Poetry Festival in 2000 and 2001.

Here's the interview:

What are you currently up to?

Currently, I’m up to promotion. I know I plan my next book to be a history of the Rust Belt Regional Poetry Slam (since this was the history of Southern Fried while I was there). I started the Rust Belt in 2000, and while I missed a couple of years (moved away briefly for family reasons), I’m back again. Other than that, I’m trying to find enough time to write more poetry (I’m sure I’d have enough for another book) or to pull together a CD of my works (I’d just have to mix it) or a CD of Southern Fried poetry (I have old tapes to mix) or some such. But most of my time these days goes to my three-year-old and teaching college composition.

In your book Let Them Eat MoonPie, you cover the Southern Fried Poetry Slam from 1992-2000. You include slam scores, pictures, fliers, and lots of other very specific information. This gets me wondering, what were your intentions with this book?

I started writing it because Southern Fried has been around for so long now; 16 years. Looking around, I realized that there aren’t many people who remember what came before the last two or three years, and I thought we needed some record of the event. It was record keeping, it was a yearbook, and it was a sort of memoir for me as a poet. It talked about the greats and the not-so-greats. I wanted a history of that part of poetry, of the earlier days of slam, and I had the information to write it. Maybe academics would be interested, but there are still some anti-slam feelings in academia.

I, of course, want it to sell widely, but I don’t think there’s a wide audience to this. I do think it’s important, but not to the average bookstore shopper who might grab a copy of the latest Sue Grafton or the like. And I do believe there’s more audience in the Southeast, since that’s the part of the country that’s geographically covered.

Oddly enough, at the same time, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz released Words in Your Face: a Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, and A Bigger Boat: The Unlikely Success of the Albuquerque Poetry Slam Scene (by a few different authors) is also just out. It seems that slam is ready to chronicle its own history without even coordinating the effort.

You've self-published 7 books of poetry. Why have you chosen self-publishing as opposed to traditional publishing?

I started self-publishing a long time ago as a way to get my work out. I’d read a piece, and people would want a copy. I liked the idea of sharing my work but didn’t think I stood a chance of getting published, so I printed them myself. I never really sold many, and I keep thinking of publishing real books of poetry someday, but it’s intimidating, especially with my schedule, to think of publishing for real. Do I need to get more individual poems published before a book publisher will consider me? Who’d actually want to buy my book? Would it just be another remaindered copy or sit on the sales table all lonely?

There’s a certain amount of either academic or pop culture popularity before your book will be picked up, after all, unless you’re selling directly to people who like what you’ve written. Since I’ll probably never be performing in most of the country, I don’t think my books will sell in most of it. How do you make that happen? You either have to be terribly clever in your promotion and design or you have to be well known.

With the popularity of blogging, do you anticipate more poets going the self-publishing route?

With what I’m reading lately, poets and writers are trying to blog some quirky ways and trying to get book deals out of it. If that works for them, then go for it. But I know of some poets who publish their works through a self-publishing website here and there, and there’s one piece of advice for them specifically: hire a proofreader before you publish there. It lowers the public’s opinion of your writings (and poetry in general) if you have typos all over them.

A student handed me a book of poetry her cousin had written, and it was just awful, but it looked like what most people who weren’t exposed to poetry would think was a book of poetry. Badly rhymed stanzas about the family dog and God’s love and every other poetic cliché out there. And what do you say to that? I simply had to tell her that it wasn’t the sort of poetry I would write, but I congratulated her cousin for (I suspect self-) publishing it (I didn’t recognize the publisher even remotely), and I hoped it sold well. It probably did, but mostly to family and friends and church members.

I see a big problem for poets wanting to be published these days. Either you get a real publisher and get distributed, which is quite hard to do, or you get a small-press or self-publishing company and you get no promotion help. The big bookstores don’t want to carry your small press book, and there are less and less independent bookstores. The really good independents are bought up by the big ones, and then you still can’t sell your book. Of course, there’s the internet, but really, do you think the majority of book buyers use the internet to get their literary fix?

Small press is great in the amount of control that you have over parts of the process, and you know you’ll actually get published, but what do you get for it? Pros and cons to the whole scenario, I know.

Who are your favorite poets?

Wow. It depends on what you’re asking me. My favorite poets that I learned in classes? My favorite poets I’ve seen on stage? Great stage poets (who also are great on paper) for me include Jeffrey McDaniel and Dan Roop. My God, Dan Roop made me realize what you could do with poetry. Dan was inspiring and interesting and a great organizer and a generous person and so much more. Jeff can do things with words that I only dream of, and I really need to get his books in my collection. Allan Wolf. Patricia Smith. Ray McNiece. Scott Woods.

The “real” poets? I’ve gone through stages as I got my MA in English, but there’s always interesting stuff out there. Linda Pastan has always fascinated me. Sharon Olds can lead my mind down new pathways and really make me think. James Tate. And these names barely even scratch the surface. I don’t really want to just read one movement, though. I like to read all different kinds from all different times.

I've seen many great live performances of poetry that don't seem to move me the same way when I read them in print. Have you ever noticed this? Do you think slam poetry offers something that can't be re-created in print?

Some poetry sounds better than it looks, sure. Some of it really relies on the performance and the sound, but some of it doesn’t. It’s one of those pigeonholes that slam deals with: everyone should be heard and not read. How ridiculous is that? Some great slam poets are equally as good in print as they are spoken. But some of them…I know certain members of the slam scene who believe we should never release books of poetry, only CDs, or better yet, only DVDs. After all, we’re nothing if we’re not being appreciated on stage. I disagree, though. At least, I don’t think we should all be releasing videos.

If you could pass on one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

I’ve often heard poets say they don’t read poetry because they don’t want to be influenced. That’s the wrong attitude. I say you can’t be a poet unless you actually study poetry. Not necessarily academically, but you have to get your hands dirty in poetry. Read lots of works by lots of different poets. Listen to lots of music with poetic lyrics (and that doesn’t exclude any sort of music that has lyrics – if you want to listen to instrumental music for inspiration, go for it, but the lyrics are worth close study to see why they work). Someone once issued a challenge to me: read a book of poetry every two days for 60 days, then write for 15 minutes on each one. If you miss a two-day stretch, start over. Read, absorb.

If you write poetry without knowing what else is out there, how do you know you’ve come up with something original? What if you’re working with a real cliché in poetry, but you don’t know it because you don’t read it? The same thing applies to listening: If you go to readings just so you can read, then you’re doing it wrong. You listen to everyone else later. Poetry readings aren’t just set up so you can read, but so that everyone can. If you’re not listening, then you’re not learning. Learn.

Another thing I did to learn to be a poet was to sit down and work out every exercise in Arco’s How to Write Poetry several years ago. Learn about structure and form before you swear you’ll never write that way. It’s part of learning to appreciate what came before you, and oddly enough, this advice all ties back to my book:

You have to know where you came from before you can move forward. It’s important to know some history of what you’re doing so you can do it better.

*****

For more information on Bill Abbott and his book Let Them Eat Moon Pie!, go to www.thewordsmithpress.com or www.southernfriedhistory.com.

Exclusive Interview With Poet Joseph Mills

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:10:47 GMT

A-ha! Here’s an interview with a poet who participated in the April PAD Challenge and wrote his first ever sestina as a result. As Joseph Mills, author of Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers (Press 53, 2008), comments, “It was smart of you (meaning me, of course) to put that towards the end since by then we were invested in finishing.”

In recent years, Mills has published two collections of poetry through Press 53; the other collection is Somewhere During the Spin Cycle (2006). With his wife, Mills has also put together two editions of A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries (John F. Blair, 2007). It seems only natural that Mills’ knowledge of wine-making and poetry would create its own poetic blend.

Here’s a favorite poem of mine from Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers and originally published in North Carolina Literary Review:

“Aging”

To speak of a wine’s future

is to speak of our own desires,

how we hope as we age

that we’ll become more

harmonious, less acidic,

that our tannins will mellow.

We recognize right now

we have a burst of flavor,

an energy, a liveliness,

but also a harshness

which later may soften

until we’re more balanced,

more approachable,

easier to appreciate.

Hold onto us;

we believe

we’ll get better.

What are you currently up to?

At the moment, I’m working on a novel set in “Carolina Wine Country” and a young adult novel that deals with the nature of time. I’m also drafting a sequence of poems about my mother’s dementia and other work for my third poetry collection tentatively entitled “Love and Other Collisions.”

So, what led to an entire collection of poems about wine?

In the last half dozen years, my wife and I researched and wrote two editions of A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries. As we traveled the state, talking to winemakers and winery owners, I found myself with material that wasn’t appropriate for the guidebook, but that I was interested in exploring and using. I wrote a few poems dealing with wine, and they appeared in my first collection of poetry, Somewhere During the Spin Cycle. The wine poems kept coming, and once I had more than a dozen I realized that there would be enough for a collection, and that this would give the volume a nice coherence. Eventually I wrote well over a hundred and then culled the best.

Do you think of yourself as writing for poets who enjoy wine or for wine lovers who enjoy poetry?

For the guidebook, I had a clear audience in mind--people interested in touring or at least learning about the state’s wineries. It’s nonfiction with a straight-forward purpose. For poetry, however, I never think of an actual audience. I write for myself. I work on a poem, and I try to shape it as best as I can. Sometimes I’m not satisfied with it, and I shelve it. Sometimes I’m satisfied enough to consider sending it out for publication which is a way of both inspiring me to work on it more and, once it’s sent, having it out of my sight for a while. Even with publication in mind, however, I don’t imagine an audience, someone actually reading it. I learned a long time ago that when you publish poetry, you shouldn’t expect any kind of response. If you do, you might be waiting a long time.

I hope the book appeals to more people than a Venn diagram middle of poetry lovers and wine lovers. In fact, maybe it will get people more involved in both. My brother, who is a teetotaler, has told me that the poems make him want to drink wine, and my wife likes to say that it’s “poetry for people who think they don’t like poetry.”

In your collection, you use specialized terms, such as "thief" and "angel's share." Do you feel jargon helps the writing process?

I love the specialized language of a field when it is in some way metaphorical. For example, the “angel’s share” refers to the evaporation in the barrels. I find this thought-provoking as opposed to technical language like “thirty inch cartridge filter housing.” I’m interested in the language that’s evocative rather than intimidating or limiting.

Jargon can sound pompous and it can obscure, but the specialized vocabulary of almost any field can be fun. On a film set, when you “cheat” something, you’ve set up an unnatural relationship, moving things too close together, so that it will come out on the film looking right. I find the term fascinating. In music, there’s a chord called “the devil’s interval” which is a terrific phrase.

Religion seems twisted into the wine. Do you find that writing about both religion and wine is a natural?

Because of the nature of grape-growing--the seasonal cycle of pruning and rebirth in the vineyard--and the way wine involves a transformation of grapes, even people who aren’t religious tend to use spiritual language to talk about it. Since what I love about wine are the stories, and historically wine has been an element in so many religions, it’s probably inevitable that I would write about the relationship at least a little.

Who are your favorite poets?

I love the work of John Ciardi, James Wright, and Philip Levine. Billy Collins consistently delights. There are poems by W.H. Auden, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell and Gary Snyder that I have returned to dozens of times over the years. I’m a fan of “The Writer’s Almanac” because I like reading just a poem at a time, integrating it as part of the day, and having its selection be a surprise. (It’s why I like the shuffle feature of my iPod.)

What are your favorite wines?

The ones I drink with my wife and with family and friends. The joke in our household is that we only “cellar” wines that we don’t like. If we like it, we drink it. The second part of the joke is that there are only two bottles in the cellar.

One piece of advice for other poets: What is it?

Consider it a life’s work. After twenty years, I’m finally writing poems that I think reward attention. I hope in the next twenty years, I’ll learn to write poems that hold up. And in the twenty years after that…

You write a little bit at a time, consistently, and it adds up, and the work improves. I’ve often had the experience of discovering a way to finally revise a poem that for years hasn’t been quite right or how to use a few lines or ideas that I have squirreled away long ago.

Finally, you're stranded on a deserted island and can only have 3 things with you: What are they and why?

My wife. She’s the only person I know that whenever we leave each other, I immediately want to call her up and see when we can meet. Plus it would finally be a chance for us to have an island vacation together. I would take our two kids, but they would probably get bored, so how about my iPod with a solar charger. It not only has thousands of songs, but also audio books and lectures on subjects that interest me, such as Mark Twain and the Civil War. I also would want a writing utensil that would work until we were rescued and something to write on. Wait, that’s two, isn’t it. Can we consider “a writing package” one item? How about an incredibly durable solar powered laptop? But, then I wouldn’t need the iPod, so what about a guitar with indestructible strings? That’s it: wife, laptop, guitar.

*****

For more on Joseph Mills, check out his Web site at http://www.josephrobertmills.com/.

Here are some of his poems available online from New Works Review:

* "The Thief"

* "Release"

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in an interview on the Poetic Asides blog, read more here.

Exclusive Interview With Poet Helene Cardona

Mon, 19 May 2008 13:39:48 GMT

It sometimes seems like all published poets wear many different hats in addition to their poetry cap. Helene Cardona exemplifies this as much (if not more) than any poet. When she's not a poet, she's an actress with credits in movies such as Chocolat and Mumford. She's also an equestrian, dancer, dream analyst, and yoga practitioner. When she's not speaking English, she's speaking one of a handful of other languages--and has worked as a translator/interpreter for several different groups.

For her collection, The Astonished Universe (Red Hen Press), Cardona put together a wonderful group of poems--written in both English and French (of course). After all, where's the challenge in writing a collection of poems in only one language. (Note: During some of these interviews, I feel like Wayne from Wayne's World--ready to fall to my knees and say, "I'm not worthy; I'm not worthy.")

Here is the interview.

The Astonished Universe is an intentionally bilingual collection of poetry. Why did you decide to do this?

I wrote The Astonished Universe in English. I did not originally intend it to be a bilingual collection. English is my fifth language, but it has been my language of choice for a long time now. I can say it chose me. I presented the manuscript, in English, to the publisher. They came back to me and said they would be interested in publishing it as a bilingual collection in French and English. At the time they had a collection in Spanish and English, and one in German and English, but none in French. So I went back to work and translated it into French. It was fascinating for me, because it rekindled my love of the French language and of writing in French again. The French translation absolutely informed the English version. As I was making discoveries with the French, I came to realize that some of the English could be improved. It became a dance between the two languages. I also felt more freedom than if I were translating someone else, because it was my own text.

Your father is a poet. How did he influence you as a writer?

My father is a Spanish poet. He was born on the island of Ibiza. His mother was from Madrid, and his father from Barcelona. He was nicknamed “el cisne vallisoletano”, the swan from Valladolid. This is because they say that the Spanish from Valladolid is the purest. His command of the Spanish language is extraordinary. I could say he instilled in me a love for words.

You’re an actress. Do you find that helps or hinders the poetic process?

It helps. Acting and poetry are simply two different forms of artistic expression. As an actress I am very drawn to films that are visually beautiful and poetic. At the same time, I always pay close attention to the screenplay. It is the backbone of the film. I was lucky to work with Lawrence Kasdan (Mumford). He writes all his screenplays, and they’re usually original screenplays. He’s a terrific writer and director. I was also lucky to work on Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat. Robert Nelson Jacobs’s screenplay was nominated for an Oscar and won the BAFTA award. Great writing helps the actor. To go back to your question, they both raise your consciousness and in that sense, enhance one another.

You’re a very well-traveled poet who is able to speak several languages. Which languages can you speak? Do you think travel and a knowledge of languages helps your poetry?

I was born in Paris. French is my mother tongue. I learned Spanish at home before I went on to study it more formally at the Sorbonne and the universities of Santander and Baeza. My mother was Greek and taught me her language. I started learning German when I lived in Geneva, and studied it more thoroughly at the Goethe Institutes in Paris and Bremen, Germany. Switzerland is a tri-lingual country, so I picked up Italian there, and then studied it more when I decided to work as a tour guide in Italy. Of course knowing multiple languages is a great advantage to writing poetry. It develops a musical ear for sounds, and gives flexibility with words and the thoughts that underlie them. Travel opens your mind and imagination.

How did you go about getting The Astonished Universe published?

It all started when I met Red Hen’s managing editor at a PEN USA event. We had a subsequent meeting at a restaurant and she suggested I send her the manuscript.

If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would that advice be?

Do things that inspire you.

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To check out more information on Helene Cardona, visit her Web site at www.helenecardona.com.

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If you're interested in checking out other exclusive interviews with poets, including Dorianne Laux, Julianna Baggott, Jillian Weise, and more, just check 'em out here.

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If you're a publisher or well-published poet who's interested in giving an interview, check out my Call for Poets here.

Exclusive Interview With Poet Julianna Baggott

Mon, 12 May 2008 15:26:02 GMT

My first experience with Julianna Baggott was on my first edition as editor of Writer's Market (Writer's Digest Books). I asked her to write a diary style piece on how she published her first and best-selling novel, Girl Talk (Washington Square Press). It was my first risk as an editor, and Julianna made me look like a genius, because she turned in a great story.

At the time, she mentioned she also wrote poetry and stories for "the younger set" under the pen name N.E. Bode. So Julianna was one of the first poets I thought to ask for an interview when I decided to do these poet interviews on the blog. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a procrastinator at times, and put it off for awhile. After finally getting a hold of her, I then took forever sending her the questions. Fortunately, she's always quick to get things turned around (and she never gives me a hard time about how long I'm taking on my end).

Baggott is the author of three collections of poetry: This Country of Mothers and Lizzie Borden in Love (both published by Southern Illinois University Press, 2001 and 2006 respectively), as well as Compulsions of Silk Worms & Bees (Pleiades Press, 2007). The words in her poems are often funny, at times confrontational, and always immediate. Working in several different writing genres seems to give Baggott an especially keen sense of what makes great poetry.

Here's a favorite passage of mine from Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees from the poem "1. Poetry Addresses Her Sister, the Novel":

You need to learn to whittle soap
                                            to a narrow bone, to live in steam
so the wool shrinks to a toughened swatch,
not a sweater, not a mitten, something otherworldly.
                    Why do you want so much?
I say little, but my memory is stained so deeply
                                                                    it glitters.

Of course, Baggott then offers a great response in the very next poem "2. The Novel Responds to Her Sister, Poetry":

It isn't as easy as you'd think
to take the reader's hand, hang his hat
on the rack, to offer a seat.
Manners. I pass around tea and cakes.
Have you ever allowed these comforts?
You let them wander rooms, disoriented.

Hopefully, I'm not disorienting you by jumping straight into the interview.

What have you been up to recently? Do you have anything coming up soon that people should be looking out for?

The last two years have been heavy on poetry what with the publications of Lizzie Borden in Love and Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees. I've been writing sonettos -- odd ones -- but my books of poems take a few years and this new one isn't fully fleshed. I have two novels coming out next year, though. One for adults called My Husband's Sweethearts (under pen name Bridget Asher) and a novel for kids and Red Sox fans The Prince of Fenway Park.

Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees was selected for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series and Lizzie Borden in Love was selected by the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. What do you think helps make a winning collection of poetry? Good solitary poems? Great connective tissue between poems? Something else entirely?

Readers you trust. I handed both books over to other poets I deeply trusted -- namely Frank Giampietro, whose first book Begin Anywhere (Alice James Books) comes out this fall, and Jennifer McClanahan a wonderful young poet. They came back to me differently imagined and I needed someone else's eyes.

In Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees, you assembled a collection of poems about poems, poetry and the craft of writing. Writing about the process of writing can be dangerous territory, but you seem to weave through it with a tense dance of serious humor. Do you try to hit certain benchmarks when writing your poetry? If so, what?

I'm not sure why it's dangerous territory. I always miss the memos on stuff like this. Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life. I don't know how not to write about it. And so I do, without any notions of benchmarks.

Are there things you absolutely try to avoid in your poetry? Explain.

Being a lazy fiction writer. I have an outlet for prose -- I write it. So what I don't want is to shove what should just be prose into the poetic form.

It seems you often put yourself in the skin of another to write your poems, whether you are Mary Cassatt or Poetry addressing her sister, the Novel. What do you feel are the benefits of writing from within another person or thing? Explain.

Now this is from my fiction roots, I suppose. I didn't start writing so that I could more deeply know myself. I was bored of myself, my life, my childhood, my hometown. I started writing as a way to know others, to get away from myself. And so I still do that. Of course, I've found that it's much easier to reveal yourself when you think you're revealing someone else.

Have you been reading any specific poets recently? If so, who and what do you like (or, I guess, even dislike) about their work?

Yes, yes. New poets. I always love new poets. I oversee the Southeast Review's Online Companion (www.southeastreview.org) and get to read tons of interviews and those names pack much of this list: Frank Giampietro, I mentioned above -- Begin Anywhere. Martha Silano -- Blue Positive. Charlotte Matthews' second book -- Still Enough to be Dreaming. Erin Murphy's third book -- Dislocation. Norman Minnick -- To Taste the Water. And we recently ran an interview with Rick Campbell who's a poet who deserves a much wider audience. His latest, Dixmont, is incredible.

When you're not writing award-winning poetry, you're writing bestselling fiction or writing novels for younger readers under the pseudonym N.E. Bode. I've also read that you've written screenplays based off your novels. How do you decide what goes where? That is, when do you know you're working on a poem instead of a short story?

I don't always know. I sometimes pick my poems up and put them into my fiction. I sometimes write a poem and then realize that it's a story. I have a story in the anthology Surreal South that began as a poem and took on a different, unexpected life in fiction. I'm toughest on the poems, though. The white gathered around a poem on the page, like a held breath, demands it.

If you could only impart one nugget of wisdom to another poet, what would it be?

Drown yourself in it -- all of it. Read like mad -- at least ten books of poems a week. Don't love everything. Hating certain types of poetry helps define your own aesthetic. Be daily. (Check out the Southeast Review's Daily Writing Regimen for a shove -- http://southeastreview.org/regimen.php.) Go forth boldly.

*****

Check out Julianna Baggott's Web site at www.juliannabaggott.com.

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Here are some links to some of her poems (for further reading):

* "Blurbs"

* "Nights in Tijuana"

* "What Poets Could Have Been"

* "Q and A: Do you have any tips? Answer #2"

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Check out other Poet Interviews here.

Exclusive Interview With Up-and-comer Jillian Weise!

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:58:31 GMT

My girlfriend and I are both poets. As a result, we share our writing with each other, as well as the writing of other poets we admire or discover. Recently, my girlfriend happened upon The Amputee's Guide to Sex, by Jillian Weise from Soft Skull Press, and she's read me about every single poem out of that collection and with good reason: It rocks!

At 26, Weise has been shooting through the academic and poetic stratosphere. After graduating from Florida State and getting her MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Weise is currently finishing up her PhD at the University of Cincinnati and plans on teaching at Clemson in the fall. She's also managed to find the time to work as an editorial assistant at The Paris Review and has had two collections of poems published, as well as four one-act plays produced. I'm not even going to get into her fellowships & awards--it's too exhausting. And did I mention that Weise is an amputee herself (an above-the-knee amputation as the result of a birth defect)?

It's easy to get distracted by all the success surrounding Weise and forget about her actual writing, but that would be a mistake. In The Amputee's Guide to Sex, Weise mixes sadness with black humor and writes candidly about the confines of the human body--something everyone can relate to, whether an amputee or not.

One passage, in particular, which I love is from "I Want You to Know This."

He's afraid to hold my hand because he thinks
it might throw me off balance. Hand-holding
doesn't throw me off balance.
I wanted you to know this, because maybe you
wondered about people with fake legs; maybe
you wanted to hold their hand but you didn't
because you thought you might trip.

And with that, let's take a trip with Weise through one of the more energetic interviews I've had in a while.

When and why did you start writing poetry?

I started writing on a dare from this guy who goes by Slick Daniels. We were taking a survey course at FSU when we ran into the Modernists. Slick said he was taking Poetry Workshop and dared me. The class was taught by Cynie Cory, who has the same enthusiasm for poems as Noah did for animals. We read lots of alive writers, which was more exciting than ever--that these guys were alive, and you could e-mail them.

We ended up under a tin roof, blazing through stacks of journals, heard the hoot of the Sirens, drove out to St. George’s Island, the whole time asking: How did you do that in the poem? And how does Tate do what he does in poems? And isn’t it effing cool? But what does it mean? And are you going to kiss me or something?

You mentioned that your first poem accepted for publication was to The Atlantic. Could you explain your submission process at that time? How long did you submit poems before that first acceptance? Has your

submission process changed any since then?

Slick Daniels sent his poems to one journal at a time while I was shadier about it. I had poems out--who knows which ones and who knows where.

When the rejections came, we shellacked them to stools & sat on them. This plan did work. I sent the same batch of poems to ten journals a month, for about six months, before The Atlantic acceptance. I didn’t know The Atlantic so I looked it up in Poet’s Market. Now I submit where poets I like publish. If Priscilla Becker or Josh Bell or Matthew Dickman or Tim Earley or Kristi Maxwell or Ben Mirov or Abe Smith or Craig Teicher is there, then I want to be there. It’s like calling ahead of time to see who’s at the party.

Creative writing teachers often chant, "Write what you know," to their creative writing students, especially at the beginning levels. With two published collections dealing with the body, do you agree with

this mantra?

Maybe what teachers mean when they say that is don’t write about the fields of sea lilies stretching for hundreds of yards across the ocean floor if you are not an oceanographer. I say go ahead & write your sea lily poem. The worst thing that can happen is it’s a bad poem. The best thing that can happen is you are the next Hilda Doolittle.

I was told to write poems that cost me something to write them. They cost me a lot. Too much? I’m still carrying ones and zeros on the budget. I go to poems looking for heart. You can tell when a poet has put a lot of heart into the poem and you can tell when they left it out. Some of them favor brain. But for me, all brain is no ache but headache.

In The Amputee's Guide to Sex, you deal with the body from a perspective most readers have never experienced. Yet, the collection is surprisingly accessible, perhaps because of the very direct and honest way you treat your subject. Do you feel writing honestly, even if the reader has never experienced it, helps make subject accessible for everyone?

Have you heard Maurice Manning read “Three Truths, One Story”?

(http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/07/spring/manning.html)

I’m happy the poetry comes off honest, but it also makes me nervous since many of the facts of the poems are not true. I am faithful only to feeling. I like Emerson’s alter idem, second self, and I like to think the speakers of the poems are second selves. Poems of mine that fail fail because they are too much second and not enough self.

As for the perspective, the disabled body has been off-limits in poetry (and culture). I felt compelled to write about it, it being a part of myself. On those rare occasions when disability happens in poems it is typically bromidic. Usually it is just some poet who has run out of ideas, and thinks suddenly, “A-ha, black face!” and then thinks, “No, no, Berryman did it, and it’s offensive,” then thinks: “A-ha, the disabled! Yes, that’s it, that’s it.” This results in phantom pain mock-ups, dismemberment metaphors, and perhaps a “cripple” who enters the poem for comment.

You've quickly shot through the graduate program and plan on teaching at Clemson in the fall. What do you feel are the benefits of graduate study? Also, do you feel there are any possible drawbacks?

I’m thrilled to be joining Clemson. There is nothing else I can imagine doing for a living than teaching poetry. It’s a blast.

Prior to a teaching gig, the situation is this: You want to write but who will pay you to do it? And what else might they make you do in return for the money? The point is to become a better writer and meet others with the same task. The possible drawback is that some people, not at my universities of course, aren’t really interested in writing. They’re more interested in crack cocaine.

With four one-act plays produced, do you consider yourself more of a playwright or a poet? Also, do you feel that one style comes easier than the other?

Yes. Both require listening to people, not just what they are saying, but where they are putting their commas in the air. The last poem I wrote came out of overhearing this guy say, “I just broke up with Sharon. I wish I’d stop doing that with women.” People are always saying things and not listening to themselves, and I’m indicted here too. This play, up on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5kq16BbdHo&eurl)

started with hearing someone say, “He’s wearing his belt of fuckdom again.” I look for these definitely said things, as they are translated, like this from Toomer’s Cane: “You are the sleepiest man I ever seed.” I love that. It sounds like someone said that to Toomer or he overheard it somewhere. I know it’s a play when there’s too much talking in the poem.

As a former editorial assistant for The Paris Review, did you learn anything about the submission, writing and/or editorial process that's helped you as a writer? If so, what?

I learned so much from Brigid Hughes, then editor, who now edits A Public Space (http://www.apublicspace.org/) and who is invested in each piece of mail that passes her desk. I said, “Brigid, how do we know when something is good enough?” And she said, without hesitating, “It is simply undeniable.”

If you could pass on one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

There is no such thing as writer’s block.

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Here are some Jillian Weise links:

* Soft Skull Press page for The Amputee's Guide to Sex (includes poems from the book)

* "Letter From Buenos Aires" on A Public Space

* "After Stein If She Were Heterosexually Inclined (With a Nod to Hugh Prather)" on Apocryphal Text

* "Dating, Like Surgery" first place from New Millenium Writings

* "Us, Like a Bad Mix Tape" on Verse Daily

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If you're a poet or publisher interested in being interviewed on Poetic Asides, go here to get more information.

*****

Check out other Poet Interviews here.

Exclusive Interview With Poet Kevin Pilkington

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:15:39 GMT

Like so many good poets, Kevin Pilkington also teaches writing--in his case, he's a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches a workshop in the graduate department at Manhattanville College. But he doesn't consider teaching a means to an end. "I feel fortunate that I have always enjoyed teaching," says Pilkington. "It's something I do and not just something else I do besides write. I've been teaching writing workshops for most of my adult life and haven't lost my enthusiasm for being in a classroom."

After interviewing him, it's easy to see Pilkington's not just trying to say the right things. His writing informs his teaching, and his teaching informs his writing. And to great effect--he's the author of five collections, including Spare Change, the La Jolla Poets Press National Book Award winner, and Ready to Eat the Sky (River City Publishing), a finalist for an Independent Publishers Book Award. A new chapbook, St. Andrew's Head, was published by Camber Press. Over the years, he's been nominated for four Pushcarts and has appeared in Verse Daily. His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden's Ferry, etc.

As you might expect from a successful poet and teacher, Pilkington has a lot of great information to share in the following interview.

You mentioned in a previous interview that teaching influences your writing. Can you elaborate on this some?

Over the years, I have sharpened my critical eye and ear so I can guide young poets through their poems and help them navigate towards what is working and away from what is not. So teaching heightened my critical reading skills, helping me install what Hemingway called “a built-in shit detector” for editing my own poetry.

Also, any writing teacher will tell you the importance of reading if you want your poetry to prosper. Reading and writing go together like religion and church: One needs the other to survive. So reading the great poets from the past as well as more contemporary established poets is a major aspect of my workshops. I’ve always believed the best teachers are on the bookshelves. That is how I learned to write my own poetry since I never took a writing class on the undergraduate or graduate levels or had a mentor.

If you teach great literature and are surrounded by great models, it seeps into your own writing as if by osmosis. By its very nature, great literature makes you want to go home to your desk and write. A few years back, thinking I was suffering from writer’s block, I became reacquainted with Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode” where one of the themes is not being able to write. It’s brilliant and shot holes in my writer’s block theory; I haven’t suffered from it since.

There have also been images and lines in many poems by talented students that have, to use Richard Hugo’s term, “triggered” ideas that pushed me to begin new poems. So I am quite fortunate to be working in such a creative, fertile environment. On the practical side, there is no heavy lifting.

Because of the academic setting, do you feel you get a good opportunity to network with other poets?

I know this is a personal response to the word “network” but it has always possessed a negative connotation when it applies to writers and especially poets. There are poets who network, meaning that they attend every literary social event and make sure to get to know the individual who may be an asset in furthering that particular poet’s career. And the stakes are high for them since they are in dire need of another grant, job, or book publication. In Manhattan , these types of events take place almost on a weekly basis. There seems to be an air of artificiality and desperation at such functions. I have never understood what any of that has to do with the real work at hand which is working laboriously over one’s poems. I’d like to believe if the work is good, the rewards (notice I didn’t say awards) will follow.

However, if network conotates friendships, then it applies. At Sarah Lawrence College, where I have taught since 1991, I have met some wonderful people and formed lasting friendships. Some are poets and some are not. I have formed strong bonds with many of the poets and writers here on the regular faculty. These friendships have formed organically like most friendships and as a rule, I have a great deal of respect for their work.

For a small college, we have a large undergraduate writing program and a well-respected graduate program. During any given week, readings are taking place on campus along with an annual poetry festival. So there are many poets coming to read or teaching workshops. It is wonderful to be a part of such a bustling, creative community.

During the past few years, I have taught a workshop in the Master’s of Writing program at Manhattanville College . Aside from teaching, I’ve brought poets and writers to participate in their reading series. Some I know personally or just respect their work. It, too, is a wonderful creative environment. Obviously, I would much rather be a part of these programs that love and work with language rather than work on the roofs like my father did.

Because of these affiliations and friendships, some readings and conference work have come my way over the years. I’d like to think that anything I’ve achieved or have yet to achieve is through my poetry and teaching reputation and not by trying to make friends with some literary honchos or by hanging out near the cheese dip at the last book party.

You are a well-published poet in well-known journals. When do you know you have enough material for a poetry submission? Why do you choose to submit to one publication over another? Do you have any type of submission tracking process?

When the poems begin to pile up, I’ll go through them to decide which ones are ready to make their way into the world; make some final adjustments after months and sometimes years of rewrites; and then decide which journal may welcome them. I make it a point never to send to a magazine I haven’t read. For instance, there is no point sending any of my work to a magazine that only publishes haiku since I don’t write them. It’s a waste of my time and the editor’s as well.

In the beginning of my writing career, I sent to journals with wide circulations and were well known, at least to poets. Then after reading them I realized the poetry they published was rather bland even if written by a well known poet. One journal that I would like to appear in because if its longevity and since it appears on most newsstands, I decided early on I would only submit to when they started publishing poems that were engaging, energized and took risks. Needless to say, I still can’t send them my work.

I learned that it is the quality of the work a journal publishes and not the quantity of its readership. I publish in some magazines with very small readerships because of the high caliber of the poems they publish. It’s easy to discover journals that publish fine poems by poets who might not have name recognition--the editors are after quality and that alone. Of course, many journals mix it up publishing good poems with not so good poems. To be fair, most editors are subjective in their tastes. What I am trying to say is I look for journals that might go for my kind of stuff, no matter how large or small its readership may be.

I can remember when I first started sending work out, I wanted to publish in Poetry. I figured all the great poets of the twentieth century, my heroes, had at one time appeared in its pages. More importantly, John Frederick Nims was the editor at the time, a poet I greatly admired and respected. So when he took five of my poems, published them in two issues and ran my name on the cover, I don’t think my feet touched the ground for months. To this day, I am thrilled those poems appeared there and more importantly were chosen by Nims.

My tracking process hasn’t changed. I write down the poems I send out, who I sent them to and the date I sent them. If a poem is taken, I put a check next to the name and if it isn’t, a line goes through it.

In an interview you mentioned that poets are lucky to not be football players or ballerinas since they tend to be "washed up" at an early age. Can you elaborate a little on this concept of how poets can mature over time? Do you think poets' skills increase or decrease with age?

“Washed up” does sound a bit harsh but what I meant to say was when an athlete or dancer has to consider retirement in their early 30s, a writer is just beginning to come into his own and excel creatively. We are lucky there are no age limits. In fact, the more one lives and experiences the joys and sorrows of everyday life the more there is to write about. The longer a poet lives, reads and writes, as is the case for many older poets, you can see how their style matures and is enriched from book to book. That is how it often works and sometimes it doesn’t for even our most highly esteemed poets. I believe there is a basic reason why some of their skills decrease.

A case in point is Robert Lowell, who in the last decade of his life published six very weak collections. This was after publishing three brilliant books early in his career. Then publishers and the rest of the literary world wanted more, as they certainly did from Lowell, so he like some others in his position stepped up the quantity of poems he published as the quality diminished. It’s the law of supply and demand--something suffers and usually it’s quality. It’s not so much a decrease of poetic gifts, it’s more rushing into print that is at fault. After all, America is a fast food society. This could also be said of John Berryman who rushed too many extra dream songs into print. It’s not necessarily a loss of poetic skills, like so many critics claim; it’s fame, what Milton calls, “the last infirmity of noble minds.”

There are poets who stuck to their guns and did not step up productivity and publish inferior work, such as Bishop, Stevens and Williams to name a few. Frost was another who didn’t rush anything into print ever; he wanted his poems to be like a “burr under a saddle” and stick around for awhile. Perhaps that is why it took him a decade before a new collection of his poems would appear. He wrote slowly with precision along with all the other gifts the greats possess. He had a long life and no one accused him of any decrease of his poetic gifts.

I'm reminded of a poem by James Cummins in which he chants "What do we want? Immortality. When do we want it? Now." Do you feel younger poets should learn patience with their poetic goals and ambition? Or do you think they should always feed off that passion and desire to write great?

That is a fun quote. Cummins must attend a lot of sporting events. When talking about “poetic goals and ambition” for the younger poet, hopefully it pertains to language and writing the best possible poems they can. In “Ars Poetica,” Horace says that when a poet finishes a poem don’t publish it for at least 10 years, continue working on it so after a decade it should be ready to go out into the world. Great advice! Who am I to argue with Horace. Pope says in “An Essay on Criticism” 1,700 years later that poets should hold onto their poems for five years. He cut the waiting time in half. The point is as Frost says “to make your poems better.” However, many younger poets rush through their poems then rush them into publication. It stands to reason that first books by poets in their twenties and early thirties who are right out of grad school read like collections of first and second drafts.

As I said earlier, if work by a poet of Lowell ’s stature suffers because he rushed his last poems into print, how could a young poet who rushes poems into print expect them to last in the classical sense, meaning to stay around for at least one hundred years. Of course, I don’t expect young poets to hold on to their poems and keep revising for five or ten years. I do however urge them to keep revising even if they think a poem is done. Their “poetic goals and ambitions” should be focused on paying homage to language and making their writing better. Many do realize that this is no easy task, nor should it be. I keep reminding them of Williams’ declaration, “Erase while you have the time, one word can change the world.” I take his pronouncement literally.

But if you mean “goals and ambitions” that pertain to jobs, awards and grants, that is something else. It’s politics and that has nothing to do with writing. Their ambition should be focused on the integrity of the poems they are writing and take to heart what Keats said about his ambition: “I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”

In teaching, are there certain points you try to emphasize to your students? If so, what are they?

There are many points I emphasize in class but first and foremost is lucidity. I want them to write clearly--I believe clarity is a virtue. That is not to say that there should not be complexity to their poems; complexity should rise to the surface after each reading. So if they are writing about a car, I want to know that. A reader should be able to get their footing and know where they are before moving around in the poem.

The Romantics made sure of that. They wanted their readers to know in no uncertain terms exactly where they were in the beginning of the poem. Closer to home, James Wright is another. He made sure his reader knew exactly where they were. There shouldn’t be any secrecy--how can you get anywhere if you don’t know where you are?

Also many younger poets feel obscurity and difficulty imply value. It doesn’t, it implies obscurity. It is much braver to write clearly since you are directly engaging your reader. You are saying, "This is what I think, now you can respond." It’s much easier to write obscure poetry because you are hiding behind a wall of abstraction. I tell students it is an act of cowardice if a poet does not convey to their reader what they think or feel. The obscure poet engages no one. Primo Levy said that writing obscurely is showing your reader you don’t care what they think. So if you don’t care about lucid communication then you are just being rude.

Young poets should listen to Pound who told us that we should go in fear of abstraction, or something like that. I ask them to avoid clichés since they are dead forms of expression that are readily available to the tongue. They are devoid of emotion. In a sense they are forms of denial; they avoid real feeling. I stress writing as rewriting and any strength becomes a weakness if it is overdone. And there are many other elements that pertain to what is found in the architecture of a poem such as: the importance of titles, rhythm, tone, the effectiveness of subtle rhyme and line breaks.

I've noticed in your poems that you often have a keen sense of location and an interesting way of sliding in interesting images. Also, I agree with a comment made by Thomas Lux about your poetry that your "speaker is always open and vulnerable." When writing your poems, do you notice that you try to do certain things, or achieve certain effects?

Landscape has figured prominently in most of my poetry. I was always taken by poets and writers who capture a strong sense of place in their work. I enjoyed reading about Lowell ’s Boston , Wright’s Ohio , Levine’s Detroit , Hugo and Stafford’s West, Joyce’s Dublin . I am intrigued how they connect not just physically but emotionally and spiritually to their surroundings. In the case of poets, it’s more the spiritual and emotional connections, since the physical is subject to change, that engages my interest. In Hugo’s “Degrees of Grey in Phillipsburg ” the decaying town is bonded to the speaker’s mental and spiritual state. The work of those writers had and continues to have a strong influence on my writing.

Because I live in Manhattan , many of my poems are urban in setting, but I’ve traveled some and know if I connect with a landscape it’s going to find its way into my writing. So the speaker in my poems and the physical landscape are connected in the metaphysical sense--one is a reflection of the other. I love metaphoric language and I’m pleased you find my images interesting. I agree with Shelly who suggests new metaphors create new thoughts and thus revitalize language. So I try to capture an image the way a photo or painting does, then put a slightly different spin on it that only language can bring. Hopefully many of my images could never be totally duplicated by the camera or paintbrush.

I was pleased Tom Lux found my speakers “always open and vulnerable.” They are certainly not the all-knowing speakers found in some poetry but men who take on what the world offers them for good or not so good. My speakers might be down on their luck but are always looking for ways of turning things around. Some lost jobs and are looking for another no matter how menial. Still others have lost at love though are willing to try it again even if they were scorched by it in the past. They are all flawed but more importantly willing to take risks, do whatever it takes to survive. And risk in art is a necessity as well.

What is the best book you've read in the past year and why?

A memoir by Albert Harper entitled Good-Bye, Union Square (Quadrangle Books, 1970) . He’s a writer who seems to be forgotten unfortunately. He covers the entire decade as a young writer in the 1930s living in and around Union Square , New York City . I always enjoy reading about the city I live in and this is the closest I can get to a time machine to experience when a $3 Italian dinner in Greenwich Village was extremely expensive. I also enjoyed his take on the young writers he met including Richard Wright, Bertolt Brecht and Langston Hughes. I found the book in a used bookstore, and it has been out of print for years. I also enjoyed his clear, concise prose style--sentences that are so unadorned that if you picked one up you could almost see through it.

*****

If you're interested in reading Kevin Pilkington's work, here are some poems available online:

* "Promises" from the Valparaiso Poetry Review

* 4 Poems from the Boston Review

* "Travel" from Verse Daily and Green Mountains Review

*****

Also, if you wish to read another interview with Pilkington, here's one done a few years back by Linda Simone for the Valparaiso Poetry Review: http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/pilkingtoninterview.html.

*****

If you're a publisher or poet interested in being interviewed in a future post on Poetic Asides, go here to get more information.

*****

Check out other Poet Interviews here.

Exclusive Interview With Valerie Nieman

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:04:28 GMT

Poet Valerie Nieman is a self-professed tomboy, who "fished for everything from native brook trout in the small streams of western New York, where I grew up, to cod and haddock by hand-lining on a head boat out of Eastport, Maine." In fact, Nieman has a bit of an adventurous streak within her that helps inform her writing.

As far as poetry, Nieman's published a couple chapbooks and a full-length collection titled Wake Wake Wake (Press 53) in 2006. But she's also published two novels and a collection of short stories. Plus, Nieman, who now teaches writing at North Carolina A&T State University, spent several years as a reporter for a small daily paper, covering everything from school board meetings to murders. At almost 50 years of age, she received her MFA in 2004 from Queens University of Charlotte.

Nieman recently set aside a little time to share a little about herself and her writing process.

You've mentioned homesteading a West Virginia hill farm and working as a reporter for a small daily before getting your MFA and moving into teaching. Can you elaborate a little on these occupations (and/or others you've had)? Have they helped inspire or shape your writing? If so, how?

I started out with a journalism degree and a job writing for a small West Virginia daily. That was a lucky and/or inspired choice (also one necessitated by money). Journalists, especially the jacks-and-jills-of-all-trades at small newspapers, are well placed to see and hear and do the things that find their way into stories and poems: You get the people, the stories, and especially the details--the mud that clings to the lugs of your Red Wings. A curious and at least moderately adventuresome journalist (and there shouldn’t be any other sort) can get a taste of so many other lives.

I’ve been three miles into the mountain in a longwall coal mining operation when a machine hit a methane pocket and the power went out for 20 minutes as the explosive gas was cleared. (You don’t know the sound a mountain makes until the machines stop, and you hear it groaning against the hydraulic shields.) I’ve watched the playing out of power and avarice in the most immediate way, not by watching CNN but by seeing small-town leaders manipulate and threaten to protect a small financial scheme. I’ve slipped on a man’s blood on the street running to a murder scene, heard the first bird (indigo bunting) sing in the pre-dawn dark on a breeding bird survey, watched a volunteer firefighter learn that his son was a passenger in a Corvette that left pieces of itself for a half a mile down a fence line.

It’s not virtual; it’s not research. It’s experience, like that hill farm--shaping a hayfield into a small farm, breaking the ice on the watering trough for cattle on bitterly cold mornings, feeling angry yet having to admire the beautiful rapacity of blue jays that pecked holes in the Lodi apples just ready for picking. I treasure all of it. Much of it has found its way into my writing, providing plotlines, stories, characters, settings, the quirky details and sensory moments.

You've published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Is there one you prefer over the others? If so, why? Do you feel working in one form helps develop skills for the others?

I started as a poet, writing in college--even earlier, a poem published in an anthology when I was in sixth grade. But then I can claim a handwritten spy novel in junior high, so both threads were there early. I’ve always toggled back and forth among genres. Each tests a somewhat different part of the writing mind, like cross-training. For me, it feels physically different when I write a poem compared with a short story or a novel. I’ve never tried to write a play or screenplay, but maybe someday. I believe that working in various genres eliminates the dreaded “I can’t think” or writer’s block--because if one thing isn’t flowing, you can work on something else. At least in theory.

While many MFA students seem to go straight from undergrad to grad study, you waited until your late 40s to pursue your MFA. Why did it take so long? Also, what made you decide to go back to school to get it?

I truly enjoyed being a journalist, and didn’t see a problem with a two-track life (three counting the farm). And it gets difficult to go back to school the longer you are away. But over time, I began to wear down--journalism is demanding. It stimulates the imagination, but leaves little time and energy for writing--like wine that provokes desire and takes away the act. The pressures of the daily story push away the time for reflection and revision. I moved into editing, and then into teaching part-time. I completed the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, and that opened doors so that I was able to begin teaching full-time. Of course, teaching has its own mental and physical demands.

Who are your favorite poets? Why?

Off the top of my head, Mary Oliver, Gerald Stern, Wendell Berry, Jane Kenyon, both Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Thomas Lux, James Harms, Joseph Bathanti, Susan Meyers, Robert Hayden, Jeff Mann, Irene McKinney, Betsy Sholl. Shakespeare, Hardy, Millay, H.D., Stevens, Rilke, Whitman. Springsteen and Emmy Lou Harris and Paul Simon and Tom Petty. Ancient Egyptian texts and the Book of Isaiah. Scientists’ and explorers’ descriptions. Read Scott Huler’s Defining the Wind for a gorgeous look at the Beaufort Scale and how it illuminated the economic and cultural and scientific life of the 19th century. I love detail, writing about nature--love to learn and to hold new names in my thoughts.

I open a journal and am sometimes just blown away by someone--I just read a long poem by Joseph Hutchison in an issue of Divider that’s been sitting around the bookshelf.

I’ll name a couple of friends and longtime inspirations: Timothy Russell, for seeing the living world inside the steel mill, and Sarah Lindsay, for her intriguing blend of science and geography with delicious fantasy.

When do you know a poem is ready for submission to a journal? How do you choose where to send your poems?

I think I send poems out too soon, or I just tend to tinker too long. I get angry with myself for sending something to a place I admire, getting it back, and seeing where I need revisions that I should have made six months before--but that can go on for a long time.

I send to journals that I admire, of course, ones that are beyond my reach and to ones where I have made a connection in the past, or that are looking for something on a theme where I have been working. You get to know the ones that have a similar aesthetic.

There are also places that I know just won’t be possible for my kind of poems.

What is the most surprising thing someone has said about your poetry? How did you feel about that?

Fred Chappell commented on a kind of moral force--“stout of heart”--in my work, and I had not thought of myself as showing a particular philosophical or moral stance. But I do recognize a kind of stubborn persistence in some of the poems and the people who inhabit them, a refusal to back down or give up.

Do you have any special writing routine?

I am a very bad role model. I do not have a set routine. I tend to write poetry when I need to scratch an itch, something has been triggered and I need to study why. A novel demands more slogging, and I am way too good at avoiding that--I have two in progress and have set aside one so that I can amp myself up to get the other moving ahead.

If you only had one piece of advice to give other poets, what would it be and why?

Keep the old stuff. I’m working now on a series of poems, a book, from pages of notes that I put on the computer years ago--tying together some existing poems with fragments and ideas for new ones. I set it all aside as I worked on a novel. Maybe it was spending weekends at the lake, maybe it was moving to a new house where Canadian geese fly over every morning--but I am working seriously on that book now. It pulls on threads that go back to childhood, to trout fishing and woods walking and reading Jack London and my father’s outdoor magazines. And it has a lot in it of friendships that led me to haiku and Basho, and to recent experiences such as taking up sailing--all coming together now.

*****

To read Nieman's bio, go to http://www.press53.com/BioValerieNieman.html.

Here are some of her poems I was able to hunt down online:

* Adam and Eve as Fire and Water, from Blackbird Archive

* Eager, from The Pedestal Magazine

* Elaine the Fair Accuses Lancelot, from the Camelot Project at the University of Rochester

*****

If you're a publisher or poet interested in being interviewed in a future post on Poetic Asides, go here to get more information.

*****

Check out other Poet Interviews here.

Exclusive Interview With Poet Dorianne Laux

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:53:49 GMT

As I’ve mentioned on this blog previously, I have a Facebook account under my full name (Robert Lee Brewer). And as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m all about playing online Scrabble at that account as well. And one of my more consistent opponents is none other than poet Dorianne Laux, who’s authored several collections of poetry and co-authored an instructional text (mentioned below) with Kim Addonizio.

Dorianne will be the first of what I hope will be many poet interviews conducted for this blog. I will categorize all these interviews under the totally misleading title “Poet Interviews.” ;)

So, let’s get started!

What are you currently up to? Any thing new coming up in the near future?

When I’m not playing Scrabble with you on Facebook, I’m packing to move to North Carolina where I’ve accepted a job at NC State. We’re also trying to sell our modest little Cape Cod style house in Eugene so we can buy a modest little Cape Cod style house in Raleigh . In the midst of all this I’m still teaching at UO ( Oregon ) until the end of the winter term and at the Pacific University Low Residency Program, so, there’s little time for new projects. I am lucky in that I have two new books out.

My first book, Awake, was reprinted in January by Eastern Washington University Press. They did a beautiful job and I like knowing it will have a second life. http://www.ewu.edu/ewupress/poetry/awake.htm

And Red Dragonfly Press just put out Superman: The Chapbook, a gorgeous letterpress edition that contains six new poems. http://www.reddragonflypress.org/

I have a jumble of new work I can’t wait to get to and revise. This summer my husband and I are going to spend 5 fabulous weeks in May at VCCA, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where we hope to write new poems, the Muse willing. I’m going to be culling and reviewing the last few years of poems and see if I can’t cobble together a working manuscript.

Joe and I will both be teaching a workshop this August at Truro Center for the Arts near Provincetown . It’s a beautiful spot and there are a bunch of wonderful classes and teachers there including Mark Doty and Paul Lisicky, Tony Hoagland, Eleanor Lerman and Martin Espada. http://www.castlehill.org/workshops_writing.html

I’ll also travel to Guatemala in the beginning of July where I’ll join Joyce Maynard and Ann Hood to teach a poetry workshop. Joyce has a home in San Marcos on Lake Atitlan and has begun to invite a poet and a fiction writer to join her there for a mini-lit fest. I’ve never been to Guatelmala and am aching to go. http://www.joycemaynard.com/writing-workshops/lake-atitlan.shtml

I’m collecting tennis shoes and writing materials to give to the children. It’s a place where paper and pencils are luxuries. I hope to bring poems back from the 10 days there.

Right this minute, I’m working on a series of poetry columns for Writer’s Digest, short essays with model poems and an exercise, much like what’s in The Poet’s Companion. The first one should be out this June.

In The Poet’s Companion, which you wrote with Kim Addonizio, you mention that poets should write what they know. Could you explain this concept a little and why you feel this way?

As I get older, I become more and more sure that I know absolutely nothing. I thought I knew about love, about death, about motherhood, men. I know nothing. I can only guess how much less I’ll know 10 years from now. But, I do know my backyard, my street, the way light bounces off a car windshield in summer, how frost glazes the roses when they are fooled into bud in February. I don’t know who we humans are or why we’re here or where we’re going, but I want to. I think those eternal questions continue to be asked, in spite of their mystery, because of their mystery. I explore those questions by looking deeply into the things I do know, the visible, touchable world. So often young poets try to speak to those mysteries directly, and unless they happen to be Rilke, they more often fail. It seems to me that the world is a pathway, a conduit, to the invisible, the unknowable, and helps us translate what we feel through the bodies we touch and that touch us.

In a review of Facts About the Moon, Robert Pinsky singles out the poem “Little Magnolia” and points to how the tree and man in the poem can be rooted and homeless at the same time. I’m often struck by how your poems are very accessible on one level, but have a lot going on beneath the surface. Do you think poems should try to be both accessible and layered?

I love that Pinsky chose that poem. It’s a small poem, one that could easily get lost in a book of longer, flashier poems. It’s a quiet piece, but yes, there’s more there if you take the time, slow down, look closely. I remember going to one of my teachers to ask about a poem I wasn’t sure I fully understood. She said, “Slow down.” I said, “You mean read it more slowly or slow down in my life?” And she said, “Yes.” Any good poem is asking you simply to slow down and, as Stanley Kunitz said so beautifully, to live in the layers. Do you know that poem? The final lines are:

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

"Live in the layers,

not on the litter."

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

“Though I lack the art to decipher it.” That’s an important line. He’s not sure what it all means, but he trusts the voice speaking to him. I don’t think we can bend a poem to our will, or that layers can be consciously engineered. Poems that try to do this usually come off as tedious and self-conscious, overwrought, but we can be fully present while writing it and hope that the complexities fold themselves into the words, that the passion we feel for our subject engenders a natural layering. It’s simply not a conscious process and so it’s hard to take credit for it. That said, yes, I want my poems to be accessed by everyone, anyone, as many as possible given the limitations of poetry. I grew up in a neighborhood of military brats, kids who didn’t give a damn if you could read the back of a cereal box let alone a book. I think I often write to those kids, the ones I never fit in with because I wasn’t quite tough enough. I write to the girls with ratted hair and denim skirts, the boys with butch cuts and torn T-shirts. I want to reach them. I also want to give them something beautiful and complex, something they can read again and again. It’s what I want as a reader.

For me, the best poems are the poems I can read and understand. On the other hand, if I understand everything in the first sitting, it’s merely information. I think of a line I love from Li-Young Lee’s poem “One Heart.” He says: “Look at the birds, Even flying is born out of nothing.” That’s a simple line anyone can comprehend on first reading, and yet each time you read it or say the line aloud, the more you think about it, the more it dissolves into mystery.

Do you have any pet peeves with poetry?

The only thing I can’t abide is dishonesty. I don’t care if you’re smart or stupid as long as you tell the truth. That’s all I want to hear. It’s what we all long to hear.

You are married to poet Joseph Millar. So, I’m wondering what it’s like being married to another poet? Do you steal each other’s ideas? Do you share early drafts of poems? Did poetry play a role in bringing you together?

Oh we steal from one another all the time. It’s impossible not to. But then we steal from every great poet we know. It’s all a pastiche. We do share our drafts, though we’ve learned over the years to hold off as long as possible for fear of boring the other to tears with draft after draft. We met in a poetry workshop. I was teaching night classes for adults at an independent bookstore in Mill Valley . He was a student, though it was more like a group of us who got together to share our work. We knew each other for a couple of years before we began a relationship.

So yes, poetry brought us together, and it has played a role in keeping us together. We find that when we can’t agree on anything, or are pissed off at each other for one reason or another, one of us will bring up poetry. He’ll say, “Hey, did you read that poem in APR by Tony Hoagland,” or I'll say, “Do you want to hear a new Lucia Perillo poem,” and that’s the white flag, the common ground, the fight is over and we can talk again.

You’ve put together 4 collections up to this point (Facts About the Moon; Smoke; What We Carry; and Awake). Do you think about how collections might come together as you’re writing single poems? Or do you work solely on a poem-by-poem basis? Or is it some combination?

I simply write poems. If I was good at the long view I’d be a novelist and make much more money and have a shot at the movies. Not that I care so much about the movies. I think I do, sometimes, but when I go deep, I realize that I am most happy when I’m writing a poem, or revising a poem, or putting a book of poems together. I may be frustrated, but it’s a fruitful, soul-making frustration. At my poetic best, I’m asking a question I have no hope of answering and making something that has little chance of being read by more than a handful of people. And that’s fine with me. I prefer it even. I'm at my best when I’m at my most anonymous, when I am one grain of sand hidden among the many, making my single pearl.

My books have always found their own way into being, poem by poem. When the time comes that I have too many to keep in a binder--an irritation--I know it’s time to make a book. I take them out and spread them on the floor to see what I have. Each time, I’ve found a thread that holds them together. We humans do this. It’s in our nature to make connections. But it’s also a frame of mind. Each of us has a question that haunts us and we pull our poems up over and over, like buckets of water, out of that dark well. The poems may seem on the surface to be a jumble of our days, but they all spring from the same source.

If you could share just one piece of advice with other poets, what would that be?

I once had a dream in which the poet Jack Gilbert came to me in a white room and sat down in a white chair at a white table. We made soup together and his had blueberries in it. I asked him if he had any advice for me as a young poet and he said, “Yes. Don’t write sissy poems. And don’t be in collusion with your own poems.” It’s still the best advice I ever got.

*****

Note to publishers and poets, if you'd like to set up an interview for the Poetic Asides blog, feel free to check out the interview guidelines available here: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/Call+For+Poets.aspx

Call for poets!

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:41:08 GMT

I’m always interested in discussing interview possibilities with poets who wish to be featured on my Poetic Asides blog, which gets a high amount of daily traffic that is always on the rise (thanks to my wonderful and loyal readers, of course, who are also poets). Here are the guidelines on how to contact me, whether you’re a poet or a publisher.

For Poets: Please send an email to robert.brewer@fwmedia.com with “Poetic Asides Interview: Author” in your subject line. The body of the message should include the following information: your full name, important publishing credits, anything else that is interesting about you, upcoming projects, links to blogs or Web sites, and whatever else you think might be of interest to me or the Poetic Asides readership (who are poets).

For Publishers: Please send an email to robert.brewer@fwmedia.com with “Poetic Asides Interview: Publisher” in your subject line. In the body of the message, please include the same information as for poets (mentioned above). Also, feel free to mail over promotional materials, such as recent or upcoming books, press releases, etc. to: Robert Lee Brewer, 5003 Woodiron Dr., Duluth GA 30097. I will review and contact if interested.

Also, for readers, if you have any special requests of poets or other characters related to poetry, please send those along to me to consider and/or to follow up on.