Quick update: The wedding (between myself and Tammy Trendle--now Tammy Brewer) went very, very well on Friday. It was attended by my baby brother Simon (the stormchaser), my mom, an old friend of the family, and my grandmother. We were married by my grandmother's boyfriend, who did a wonderful job. As luck--and a little skill on the part of my grandmother's boyfriend--would have it, I kissed the bride at 8:08 p.m. on 08/08/08.

We picked up our marriage license in Dandridge, Tennessee, around noon and were wed in my grandmother's backyard in unseasonably nice weather. No heat. No humidity. Wow!

Later in the evening, my other younger brother David (the computer whiz) and his fiancee showed up so that we could have a nice family weekend in the Smokies. Lots of other stuff happened, too, but the main points are that we got married; we had fun; and we bought lots of candy in Gatlinburg. Hope everyone else had a great weekend, too!

Some of you have asked over the past few months if I do or will teach any online courses. Well, after speaking with Joe Stollenwerk at www.writersonlineworkshops.com, I will start teaching some poetry courses online.

My Fundamentals of Poetry Writing course will begin on 9/18 and it should kick butt.

To learn more, including a description of the course, just go to http://www.writersonlineworkshops.com/retail/courses.aspx?r=fundamentals-of-poetry-writing.

As you'll see on the page, you can sign up for my class directly. And I think they cap the classes at 15 students--so thought I'd give y'all first crack at signing up.

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):

19

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.

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?

1. 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.
2. I've gotta mostly completely love the poems, the fiction, the art work, the layout, the whole shebang, or no thanks.
3. I avoid submitting to mags where I don't have a prayer (I'm not talking long shots, I'm talking completely different aesthetic).
4. 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:

1. Heidi Lynn Staples—wacky, wild, mind-blowing leaps;
2. Matthea Harvey—startling line breaks and imagery, lots of surprises;
3. Jenny Browne—I love how her poems are both grounded and surreal;
4. Sandra Beasley—oh man, has she ever changed how I see the world, but especially cherry tomatoes;
5. 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?

1. Ignore all oracles.
2. Don’t be too cocky or too humble.
3. Figure out the poems you were given to write, and get to it. 
4. 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.

While this might be too basic for some of the blog readers, I thought it wouldn't hurt to share some poetic terms for poets who've not taken formal courses in poetry. Personally, I love knowing more about the various terms, and I've got such a bad memory that sometimes it's good for me to have a refresher or two on the basics.

The stanza in its most basic sense is each group of lines in a poem. For instance, in a sestina there are 7 stanzas with the first 6 stanzas containing 6 lines and the final stanza consisting of 3 lines.

Stanzas can come in several different lengths, from one to one million (or more) lines in length. In fact, some of the shorter stanzas have official names that can be applied to them.

1-line stanzas are monostich.

2-line stanzas are couplets.

3-line stanzas are tercets.

4-line stanzas are quatrains.

5-line stanzas are quintains (or cinquains).

6-line stanzas are sixains (or sestets).

7-line stanzas are septets.

8-line stanzas are octaves.

So, getting back to the sestina, we could be all smart and say it is composed of six sixains followed by a tercet.

Or we could just say a sestina is composed of a sadistic pattern of end words that leave many poets curled up in a fetal position chanting, "There's no place like home," while clicking their heels together with their eyes shut tight against the world.

Poetry is a form of communication--communication between the poet and the reader. But can poetry also be a form of instruction? Possibly. For this week's poetry prompt, I want you to write a poem with the title of "How to (blank)" where you use the title as the springboard for your poem.

You can insert whatever you wish into that blank and then go in any direction with the actual poem. That is, you don't have to write out the recipe for a poem called "How to make mama's lasagna"--instead, you could talk about mama, or lasagna, or something completely different. As with all the Wednesday prompts, feel free to have fun with it and get creative.

Here's my attempt for the day:

"How to be a good parent"

I spell out the names of my sons
and place them in a hat. I wear
the hat at all times hoping I
will never need to reach inside.

Our Poetic Asides inaugural Poet Laureate, Sara Diane Doyle, has been busy-busy-busy this summer working with teen writers. But not too busy to share with her fellow Poetic Asides crew a new poetic form she developed with one of her students, David Edwards. Since Sara knows the form best, I'll let her explain the form to you in her own words.

*****

A few months ago I began exploring various poetic forms. With each form I tried, I would post my attempt on a forum for teen writers, where I am a mentor. One of the teens, David Edwards, got interested in forms, especially the “created” forms. He asked if anyone could invent a form and I said “sure!” Then, he got the crazy idea that we should create a form together.

To start, we wanted to throw in every poetic element that we really liked. David came up with the meter and feet and I added in the repeatin