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Interview With Poet Ann Fisher-Wirth

From Carta Marina

December 16

Red taillights lead me uphill, downhill—
I watch them from the bus’s steamy window,
pressing my cheek against cold glass
as I’m carried from the airport past fields and factories,
past Märsta in the midnight
where the old men still hunt elk-moose
till bloody haunches fill their freezers.
It’s not this man or this man, not
these golden daughters or this dream-ravened swaddle:
no, it’s the doors closed or the doors opened,
it’s the heart gone night. The gods
stream back and forth across the threshold.
You can ride it, you know,
get on the dark bus and let it carry you.
That’s how I’ve always been, going home, going nowhere—
uphill, downhill, the taillights like rubies,
past fields where the trees are just darker effacings.

Ann Fisher-Wirth agreed to an interview with myself and 32 Poems. And here is what she had to say.

How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I’d never say anyone was “just” a poet, because a poet is a pretty amazing thing to be. But writing poetry is not the only thing I do. I teach American literature, poetry workshops and literature courses, and a wide range of courses in environmental studies at the University of Mississippi.

I also teach yoga, and that is a really important part of my life. I’ve been married for nearly 26 years to Peter Wirth. We have five grown children—mine, his, and ours—and rapidly expanding numbers of grandchildren. We live in a very cool old Victorian house with two huge pecan trees in front of it, in Oxford, Mississippi.

I’ve lived in the South for almost 30 years, but I grew up first as an Army brat all over the world, and then in Berkeley, California, so I love to travel and hold many places in my heart.

Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

Environmental issues and consciousness-raising are my obsession. Truly they are. I am convinced from everything I’ve read that we have very little time left before we reach a catastrophic tipping point for life on earth. We may already be there.

One helpful book is Lester R. Brown’s Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, which can be downloaded free from the Earth Policy website, and which fully documents how desperate a situation we humans have created environmentally, and how thorough-going and rapid our response must be—far beyond anything now being considered by those in power.

In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

It’s true, most of my friends are writers, and if they are not writers they are professors. I have gotten to know hundreds of writers since I began focusing on writing, and some of them have become wonderful friends.

I’m also very close to a number of people I know through the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment—again, writers and academics. But how could I escape it? My mother was a teacher, my sisters, brother-in-law, husband, and two of our five children are all teachers. It’s a great way to live.

If you’ve enjoyed Ann’s answers so far, I suggest you check out the rest of my interview with her over at 32 Poems Blog. Once there, you can find out about her workspace, her inspirations, and much more. Feel free to leave me comments and discuss Ann’s work (sampled above), her interview, or your thoughts on poetry in general.

Interview With Poet Thomas Stemmer

Thomas Stemmer recently agreed to an interview with myself and 32 Poems. And here is what he had to say. 

How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I cannot imagine a crowd eagerly listening to poetry. However, in 2008, when I was invited to a conference in Pakistan, I took part in a Mushaira (a traditional poetry reading), and indeed, everybody was very eager to listen. Even a peasant there knows verses of – let’s say – Rumi or local poets for example. This is incredible. But, I am just a poet, yes, a romantic in a way.

Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

Yes: My mechanic typewriter. I JUST LOVE IT!

From Shortest Poems these Days:

The Law of Grace
There is
Some good fat
Bavarian sausage
In the refrigerator.

 

Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Poetry is not elitist. If you WANT to read poetry, you can. Everybody is responsible for himself. The accusation of elitism is just an excuse to cover up a certain – maybe unconscious – unwillingness, I suppose.

Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

Foods? No. But in order to overcome a writer’s block, I use to draw, to make collages on paper or to do more of my scientific work as a orientalist. On of these doors is always open. In case of poetic emergency: hours of daydreaming! That helps ALWAYS.

If you’ve enjoyed Thomas’ answers so far, I suggest you check out the rest of my interview with him over at 32 Poems Blog. Once there, you can find out about his workspace, his inspirations, and much more. Feel free to leave me comments and discuss Thomas’ work (sampled above), his interview, or your thoughts on poetry in general.

Interview With Poet Rosemary Winslow

Going Home
by: Rosemary Winslow

There is no going home
as usual

the vehicle stalls

in reverse gear

in mud tracks

as essential as
the flat fields, the blades

of shadowed pines over the drive,

the sun bleeding

from the west.

On the rise the house,
painted clapboard, the color of cream,

is rented now like bodies

of water and minerals made

living by some miracle

which is to say some process
we don’t understand.

Some day we’ll have a

different owner,

a different lover,

pine trees and whirling wind
that primitive communion

a new testament

of each generation.

All going home is never going back—

there may be ruin and mud tracks
deep to make wheels spin. The only way

is slogging on,

or else walking

on water.

Or yet it may be dry
the sand flying in your nostrils

but you must breathe, must go, must go

on, which is to say, go on making

required visits, like stations

of a cross. It is a way
of finding what we lost

or never had, of learning we are only

renters, and making new covenants,

going where we belong.

Rosemary Winslow recently agreed to an interview with myself and 32 Poems. And here is what she had to say.

1. Not only are you a contributor to 32 Poems, you are also a professor of literature and writing at The Catholic University of America and have won the Larry Neal Award for Poetry twice. Which of these do you find most rewarding and why? Could you explain how you felt about winning the Larry Neal Award and how that came about?

Serena, I want to thank you for the opportunity to think more about what I do as a poet and why. I’ve been fortunate to have many poems published in 32 Poems and other really fine places. And, yes, I’ve won the Larry Neal Award for Poetry three times–third place in 2001, second place in 2002, and first place in 2006. Awards can be a wonderful affirmation of one’s work, and I’ve been pleased that there are folks out there who like poems I’ve written. I wish there were more awards and more recognition for others who write at least as well if not better than I get less recognition.

I also love teaching, especially teaching poetry. To work with students in small classes–which I’ve been given the good fortune and opportunity to do–is enormously rewarding. I’ve stayed in touch with many of my former students through the years—I get to experience the amazing transformation of students into friends, each time as interesting and unique as a poem Opening up ways of reading, both understanding meaning and also the other forces at work in fine poems, is a real joy. I feel it enriches students’ lives, and teaching them certainly enriches mine. I can’t say which is most rewarding. They go together. I couldn’t teach what, nor the way, I do if I weren’t writing poems.

The first excellent teachers and critics of literature in the U.S. were writers, they started this business and I’m pleased to be able to do in some measure what they did and envisioned for the future. Writing literature gives a teacher the capacity to teach poems from the inside, from the perspective of how they are made, how they are put together. It’s possible to teach poems as poems, as made, and verbal art, in a way not possible without knowing how to make them.

2. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

Obsessions? I haven’t tried to discover what obsessions I might have. I try to confine my obsessiveness to poetry, to getting every word, line, mark of punctuation perfect, which is a way of saying a poem’s done, finished, it looks and feels right to me. Poetry’s a good place for that, much better than in other areas of life! Eamon Grennan once said a particular long poem of mine was obsessive when he read it in draft. “Obsessiveness is good,” he said. He meant, in poetry, and that’s fine with me to have it if it makes for good art. As long as it enriches instead of dampening my life!

3. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

Right now I’m working on poems about a week last month when my mother died. I’ve never written about experiences so close in time to their happening before, and I was surprised that I both felt pressured to and could actually write so soon. The experience was so intense, because I stayed with her during her last two days and nights. The sheer physicality stripped away from everything that normally occupies us, and the huge emotional range were so indescribable that I found I was too restless to sit still, or even think straight, afterward. Then one afternoon I decided to sit down and try to write poems about that week, and from that moment the restlessness ceased and hasn’t returned.

Before my mother died, I had been working on a series of poems about genocide, and then some poems that I still don’t know what they are about. Something inner, but expressed in a kind of half-surrealistic half-realistic imagery taken from nature. I grew up immersed in nature on the farm, so my mind naturally goes there. I’ve lived in cities for 20 years, but I’ve given up hoping I might write much urban poetry.

If you’ve enjoyed Rosemary’s answers so far, I suggest you check out the rest of my interview with her over at 32 Poems Blog. Once there, you can find out about her workspace, her inspirations, and much more. Feel free to leave me comments and discuss Rosemary’s work (sampled above), her interview, or your thoughts on poetry in general.

About the Poet:

Rosemary Winslow is on the faculty of the Catholic University of America, where she teaches writing and literature, and where she has directed writing programs for 19 years. Based on her work, which has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, she has received a residency grant at the Vermont Studio Center as well as a writer’s grant and three Larry Neal Awards for Poetry from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities. Her latest book is Green Bodies.

Interview With Poet Jeannine Hall Gailey

When Red Becomes the Wolf

In my dream you brought me fried bologna sandwiches.
“But wait,” you said, “You don’t even like bologna.”
I wolfed them down without answering.

I have never owned a red cape,
that’s asking for trouble, I knew.
In the forest by your house,

I met someone gathering wood. “Nice axe,”
I said before wandering further.
I was obtaining samples for my botany class.

How many daisies make a statistic?
I thought of Persephone, her dark gash
that allowed Hades passage. Which flower?

I was hungry, and tired. I entered someone’s
cottage, it was dark, and there was an old woman.
I volunteered to take her to get her hair done.

Alone, I mentioned I was born under the sign
of Lupus. “No,” she corrected, “Lupae.”
Later, eating sandwiches, we discussed you

and also whether I could wear her fur coat.
“It makes you look feral, with your green eyes,”
she said. Oh grandmother, what a big mouth you have.


I recently had an opportunity to interview Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Becoming the Villainess, in conjunction with 32 Poems. The interview will be partially posted at Savvy Verse & Wit and in full at 32 Poems Blog. Without further ado, here’s what Jeannine had to say.

1. Not only are you a contributor to 32 Poems, you teach at National University’s MFA program, have published several poetry books, and volunteer on the editorial staff at Crab Creek Review. What “hat” do you find most difficult to wear and why?

I found out that despite years of resisting it, I actually adore teaching, especially teaching poetry, so I feel really lucky to be doing a little bit of graduate student teaching at National University. For me, writing and reading poetry can consume all my time, so it’s important to balance out the poetry work with paying freelance gigs and volunteering – I’ve been a volunteer in some capacity for local literary magazines for about ten years, first with Raven Chronicles, then The Seattle Review, then Silk Road (out of Pacific University) and now Crab Creek Review, which is run by some excellent editors that are also good friends. I really want to help them succeed. My hardest hat to wear is usually whatever I’m doing for money – it’s easy to get distracted by all that unpaid poetry work! I’ve been trying to do more freelance work that involves poetry – essays, interviews, articles, etc. – to kind of stave off that poetry-addict problem.


2. Could you explain your shift from an interest in biology as an undergrad to your current proclivity to literature and poetry today as an MFA graduate?

Well, I wanted to be a holistic doctor – a bit of a weird goal for someone back in 1991 — but I ended up getting sick so often while volunteering for various hospitals around campus that my doctor advised me that medicine might not be an ideal career for me. So my health problems led to me become a technical writer after getting my degree in biology, combining my love of writing and science/technology, then to life as a professional writer, editor, and manager for some big companies during the tech boom, and finally to getting back to one of my early dreams – writing poetry.

As a kid my mother encouraged me to read and memorize poetry, and my fifth-grade teacher had me bring in new poems every day, to get me in the habit of writing and revising poetry. So I think I reverted to my early training in my late twenties, and ended up going back to school – first, for an MA at University of Cincinnati, then, some years later, for my low-res MFA at Pacific University. I was fascinated by the critical work at UC, where I found out about things like “feminism” and “intertextuality” but I have to say my experience at Pacific was much more liberating and, well, it was a lot of fun to focus on my own writing for two years.

I’m still very interested in environmental science, and things like the science of virology or medical botany. I still read a lot of academic science journals just for kicks. Science creeps into my poetry every once in a while.

3. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

I think that people who consider poetry elitist or difficult just haven’t been exposed to enough poetry. People often encounter poetry once, in high school – and form their opinion for life – probably from a sample of high modernism or poetry written hundreds of years ago; no wonder they consider it difficult!

In today’s poetry world, there are so many diverse forms and types of poetry, that there really is something for everyone. In my chapbook and first book, I worked consciously to write poetry that would be appealing and accessible to a contemporary high-school or college student – I thought poetry about superheroes and video game characters might be interesting to them. Of course, there are references to Greek and Roman mythology and 16th-century fairy tales in the book too, so I guess I couldn’t make it all too easy. I think I was using my little brother as my “ideal” reader – someone who is intelligent, who grew up playing on the computer, who was well-versed in popular culture, who was a reader, but might not pick up a book of poetry unless he liked the subject matter.

And, I should also say that when my little brother was 17 and a bit of a…hoodlum, I dragged him and some of his friends to a Louise Gluck reading – this was back when she was promoting Meadowlands. There we were in the back of the room, this bunch of teenage boys dressed in black and me. But they loved it. My brother still has her book. So you can never assume that you know what a reader might understand or enjoy. I believe we should trust readers more, not less.

I wouldn’t prescribe that all writers should try and be “accessible;” I actually like poetry that makes me work a little bit, hunting down references or making imaginative cognitive jumps. Every writer has to stay true to their own style.

4. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I’m working on finding a good home for two manuscripts, one on Japanese folk tales and anime characters, another called “Unexplained Fevers” about fairy tales trapped in sleep states – Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Rapunzel. And I’m working on yet another manuscript that focuses on the history of Oak Ridge, Tennessee and my own personal history growing up there: my father, a robotics scientist and professor, consulted for Oak Ridge National Labs while we lived there. It’s probably the most personal work I’ve written.

I’d also like to get more involved in the local poetry community here in San Diego. It’s not quite as diverse or lively as the poetry community in Seattle, but I want to be an active part of it in some way. Someday, when I have enough money and time, I’d like to start my own press.

If you’ve enjoyed Jeannine’s answers so far, I suggest you check out the rest of my interview with her over at 32 Poems Blog. Once there, you can find out about her workspace, her obsessions, and much more. Feel free to leave me comments and discuss Jeannine’s work (sampled above), her interview, or your thoughts on poetry in general.

Also, stay tuned for my review of Becoming the Villainess.

About the Poet:

Jeannine Hall Gailey was born at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, and grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. She has a B.S. in Biology and an M.A. in English from the University of Cincinnati, as well as an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Pacific University. Her first book of poetry, Becoming the Villainess, was published by Steel Toe Books in 2006. Poems from the book were featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Verse Daily; two were included in 2007’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

She recently taught with the Young Artist Project at Centrum. In 2007 she received a Washington State Artist Trust GAP Grant and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review, writes book reviews, and teaches at National University’s MFA Program.

Interview With Poet Steve Schroeder

In conjunction with 32 Poems Blog, Savvy Verse & Wit continues to bring you interviews with contemporary poets. Please welcome, Steve Schroeder.


We Never Did Anything

by Steve Schroeder

Previously Published by Copper Nickel

We never did anything bad to him.

He never did anything bad to us, he said, he cried, he lied.

He hit the reset button.

We hit the wall with him.

We taught him to shout shit at the neighbors across the street.

He learned his words with fucking Cocoa Puffs.

He squeaked when squeezed.

We named that disease for him.

We slingshotted golf balls and ball bearings.

He bundled up in blankets and blundered through the dark.

We were a bear hungry under the stairs.

He hid the hummingbird feeder syrup.

He pounced from the ceiling fan as it spun.

We grabbed the scruff of his rubber chicken neck and shook.

He stuffed himself with fluff and hot lightbulbs.

We wrapped him in subliminal tape while he slept.

We unzipped his chest.

He was completely hole.

He never did anything bad.

We never did anything worse.

1. Not only are you a contributor to 32 Poems, but you also have a new book, Torched Verse Ends, coming out soon. Please share a bit about your experience writing the book and about how many poems you previously published that are included in the book. (And anything else you would like to share.)

Torched Verse Ends, now out from BlazeVOX, is my first book. It contains poems written from 2003 through 2008, though far from all the poems I wrote or published in that time. It’s evolved a lot since I started sending it out in 2006, when it was not yet remotely ready to be a book. The experience of writing the overall book boils down to “Whoa, I might be able to organize these poems I’ve been writing into a book,” then “God, why did I ever think this was a good way to organize a book?”

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why? Also, do you believe that writing can be an equalizer to help humanity become more tolerant or collaborative? Why or why not?

For me, the sonic and textual aspects of the best poems are inextricable, but reading a poem on the page and hearing the same poem can be vastly different experiences depending on the speaker. If you’re not a particularly good reader, do something besides reading straight into the page in a monotone, even if it’s setting off firecrackers mid-poem.

If writing improves humanity in any way, it’s going to be incidental at best and most likely completely accidental. Sure, occasionally a didactic piece like The Jungle or Uncle Tom’s Cabin achieves its goal, but mostly it’s just bad literature. That’s not to say you can’t address political or social issues, but good writing has to be paramount over trying to change the world.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

Almost anything I do, I do obsessively: Reading and trying to write speculative fiction and Watching and quoting The Simpsons. Fire’s another obsession, to judge by the first book. Poker, Scrabble, basketball, Competition. Publishing poetry happens to be a fun competitive game I’m pretty good at.

Check out the rest of the interview with Steve at 32 Poems Blog, here.

Interview With Poet Alexandra Teague

In conjunction with 32 Poems Blog, Savvy Verse & Wit continues to bring you interviews with contemporary poets. Please welcome, Alexandra Teague.

Nose Bleeds
by: Alexandra Teague
Previously published by 32 Poems and forthcoming in Mortal Geography (2010)

When I was the poor girl at the private school, I imagined the rich

living at higher altitudes where the air was thinner. This explained

why the girls with new penny loafers lay like swooning princesses

in the nurse’s office, their heads tilted back, nostrils trickling red

threads of refinement. They would return to class, collars stained,

Russian royalty like the hemophiliac Romanovs of whom I was

only a namesake, not an heir. At recess in winter, snow-white

kleenex drifting from pockets, white rabbit fur jackets. Years later,

my classmate, daughter of Texas’s largest fur fortune, stabbed

her father to death for money and was sentenced for life. She’d played

the mother in our 4th-grade melodrama. As her daughter, the heroine,

I could pretend to be frail. My nose never bled, no matter how

I willed thick veins to weaken. I blamed my mother, granddaughter

of a housekeeper, our ruddy bloodline that kept surviving surviving.

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room of listeners hanging on your every word? What would you tell them and what wouldn’t you tell them and why?

My standard self-trivia is that I’ve visited all 50 states; I’ve also lived in 8 of them. I’ve always had a strong sense of impermanence and a wariness about getting too comfortable in one version of reality.

For years, I’ve had a hard time explaining where I’m from. Oakland is pretty homey right now, although I’ve been claiming since I moved to the Bay Area 8 years ago that I’m on my way somewhere else. I definitely love traveling: Oaxaca, Guatemala, the Kalalau Trail in Kauai, Japan.

A couple of summers ago, my boyfriend and I hiked all 220 miles of the John Muir Trail through the High Sierras. We love hiking, but we didn’t really know what we were getting into and spent a lot of our time trying to figure out how to quit. In the end, 19 days of hiking and camping was one of the most powerful, transformative things I’ve ever done. I might admit that some of my friends roll their eyes now when I say that I’m going on a trip. I’m always complaining about not having enough writing time, but the minute I get a break from teaching, I climb on a plane or pack my hiking gear. I know I might be more productive if I stayed put occasionally, but there’s too much of the world left to see.

2. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

Besides maybe traveling, I don’t think of myself as having obsessions, but I can actually get pretty obsessive once I immerse myself in a project: whether it’s cleaning the house, or grading a papers, or writing a poem. Poems are definitely the worst. I always think, “I’ll just work a little more on this line, and then I’ll take a break. . . Oh, except I’ve almost got this next part, so I’ll just work on that and then I’ll stop for lunch. Oh, I’m so close to being finished, and I’ll really, really stop by dinner time. . . “ And then suddenly it’s dark, and I haven’t eaten, and I’m still changing words and line breaks in the zillionth penultimate draft.

3. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I’m starting to draft some poems for whatever comes after Mortal Geography. I definitely didn’t know I was writing that manuscript until many years into the process, so it’s strange to be starting a little more self-consciously. I have several ideas for themes, but am also not really sure I’m the kind of writer who can, or will, delve into a single theme. I guess we’ll see. I’ve also been working on a novel for a couple of years; my mental deadlines keep getting extended, but I’m hoping to finish a draft of it this year. It’s a magical-realist story set in Arkansas—nothing that I thought I’d ever write, and I’m having an amazingly fun time with it.

Read some of Alexandra Teague’s poems.

Check out the rest of the interview with Alexandra at 32 Poems Blog, here.

Also, have you checked out my latest article on the Examiner? Here’s my D.C. Literature Examiner posting about YA novels in verse or the Michael Jackson Biography Comic.

Don’t forget my giveaways: 2-year Blogiversary, here and here and here.

Interview With Poet H. L. Hix

Welcome to another 32 Poems Blog and Savvy Verse & Wit interview. This time, we have Harvey L. Hix, author of Legible Heavens and other poetry volumes.

1. Not only are you a contributor to 32 Poems, you are also a professor of English at the University of Wyoming. What “hat” do you find most difficult to wear and why?

The teaching, definitely. In my writing, I feel accountable, certainly, but to myself, to standards of integrity that feel as though they come from inside. In my job as a professor, though, I am accountable to the University that employs me (and ultimately to the citizens of the state whose university it is), and — more importantly — accountable to the students. I find those forms of accountability, which feel as though they impose themselves from outside, more difficult.

We live in a world populated by forces that conspire to reduce us to consumers (in which capacity it is crucial that we not think and that we not establish a unique identity), and, rightly or wrongly, I see the university as one of the few counter-forces resisting that conspiracy. Because the responsibility of resistance seems so vast, so far beyond the capacity of any one person to effect, teaching feels very oppressive to me. In the moment, conversing with students in the classroom, it is joyful, almost ecstatic, but as an ongoing fact and a duty, I find it intimidating, even overwhelming.

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why? Also, do you believe that writing can be an equalizer to help humanity become more tolerant or collaborative? Why or why not?

I myself have more interest in written poetry, because I want to be able to slow down, to re-read, to find my own path and pace through the work. And I do trust the expanded and clarified logic of the written, the complexity of thought it makes possible, which means that, yes, I think writing can/does invite tolerance and collaboration, can/does advance equality and liberty, in principle, though for various reasons I’m less certain of its doing so in fact. I’m influenced on this issue by Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato, and other works.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

My poetry results from my obsessions, but surely the world is a better place if I don’t find any additional ways to enact or announce my obsessions.

To check out the rest of my interview with Harvey, go here. Harvey will tell you about his friendships, how he stays healthy as a writer, his writing space, and his current projects. Check out the 32 Poems Blog while your there, too.

About the Poet:

Recent Poetry Collections include God Bless: A Political/Poetic Discourse, Chromatic, which was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry, and Shadows of Houses, all from Etruscan Press. Translations include On the Way Home: An Anthology of Contemporary Estonian Poetry, translated with Jri Talvet. Other books include As Easy As Lying: Essays on Poetry (Etruscan) and Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes: Legacies of Postmodern Theory.

Honors & Distinctions: NEA Fellowship, KCAI Teaching Excellence Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize

Interview With Poet Sidney Wade

Welcome to the latest edition of my interviews with poets with 32 Poems magazine. The full interview with Sidney Wade was posted at 32 Poems Blog on May 11. Check out one of Sidney’s poems and then check out the interview below.

Sexual Blossoms and Their Fierce Addictions

Yesterday’s tulips in the crystal bowl

have begun to open and already they’ve

partially exposed their pistils and stamens.

In the coming days

these petals will open in a brazen

yawn, their private parts thrust

into the shocked and fascinated

room. Very soon the whole

apartment will start to misbehave–

the fainting couch and ottoman will shed their raiment,

weirdness will graze the ceiling and raise

eyebrows in the carpet lice. With sex emblazoned

on the air, the afflicted chamber will swell with lust.

A hystericalectomy is clearly indicated.

1. Not only are you a contributor to 32 Poems, you have authored five collections of poetry, edit Subtropics, and teach a variety of poetry courses. Which of these “hats” do you find most challenging or rewarding and why?

It’s nerve wracking work, writing poems, but when the work gets good and gets going, there’s nothing better in the world. So that’s probably the most challenging and rewarding at once. Editing Subtropics is easily the most simply rewarding, as I get to see, every week, every month, what very fine poems are being written around this country these days. And being able to tell people you’d like to publish their work elicits marvelously joyful responses. Who couldn’t love a regular influx of extremely happy emails? And teaching has its own pleasures and difficulties, the former fantastically outweighing the latter, thank goodness.

2. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

Hunting for mushrooms. Cooking mushrooms. Pasta. Cheese. Practicing and improving, slowly, on the viola.

3. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

Not really. Since I’ve been writing and teaching, my daily life tends to revolve around other writers, students, colleagues, etc., so by default those are the folks I get to know. My non-writer friends, however, are still with me, and always will be. Segregation is never a good idea.

4. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

By reading, reading, reading.

5. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I’m trying to find time to finish translating a book-length selection of the poems of Melih Cevdet Anday, an important Turkish poet. I also have completed about half or two-thirds of a book, tentatively entitled “run-on” which, if I can do it, will end up an entrancing and very long, skinny poem that just goes and goes and goes.

Grand Disastery

moored by fine

tethers to certain death

a hornet fizzes

on the windowsill

a spider flies

to its side

to securely bind

this abundant harvest

the hornet in shrill

thrall to agony drills

a hole in God’s

provident breast

pocket

in the sublime

cold light

of this tiny

constellation

the bald pulp

of the hornet’s diminishing

hum feeds growing eyes

and hungry sockets

the figure is clean

a small

black aster

hung among

the stars

Want to find out what Sidney’s writing space looks like? Find out what she thinks about contemporary poetry and popularity and much more. Check out the rest of my interview with Sidney here. Please feel free to comment on the 32 Poems blog and Savvy Verse & Wit.

About the Poet:

Sidney Wade is the author, most recently, of Stroke (2008) and Celestial Bodies (2002). Wade edits poetry for Subtropics, a magazine published by the University of Florida. From 2006-2007, she served as President of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).

Don’t forget my giveaways:

1 copy of Rubber Side Down Edited by Jose Gouveia, here; Deadline is May 15 at 11:59 PM EST

2 copies of The Last Queen by C.W. Gortner, here; Deadline is May 22 at 11:59 PM EST

Interview With Poet Erika Meitner

Gateway Drug by: Erika Meitner

When I asked him over beers one night

what the meaning of life was

my friend Jon replied, We all think we’re ugly,

but we’re not. And for once

I agreed with him—how seductive, the idea

that arbitrary cruelty might evaporate

if everyone felt beautiful

in their own skins. I went to talk

to the local eleventh grade class

about writing poetry, was reminded

how everyone is asymmetrical then,

heads huge and ungainly, limbs restless and taut;

the kid in the back row hiding behind a curtain of hair

carving swear words into his arm with the staple remover,

the girl in the second row sizing me up

with her jeweler’s eye. In high school

they showed us films once a year

to boost our self-esteem, keep us

off drugs—lavish multi-screened productions

with titles like The Prize, soundtracks singing,

My future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.

We are what we think we are, and one thing

inevitably leads to another—drugs to sex, sex

to cigarettes. A head leaning on a shoulder

and suddenly you’re naked, I’m naked,

air conditioner washing over us like ocean,

moon shining off the brick wall in the back

of a Tribeca art gallery, the detritus

of the party around us, trance music spinning

on a turntable, making out high like high-schoolers

in front of someone else’s locker. Remember

being the kid who had to get your lunch or math book, ask

the lip-locked couple in front of your locker to move?

Did you say, Excuse me, tap them gently?

I never had that courage, shared

a neighbor’s book, bought hot lunch. But tonight

we are as cool as our daydreams were then,

magazine pages and mirrors, straight-edge skaters,

drama queens, hair gods and punk princesses

smoking in the back row, the health teacher’s nightmare,

impossibly drugged, and when I touch

your clay lips with my iron fingers,

trace your beveled collarbone

with my fluted mouth, the tune I play

pushes hallway lockers open with gale force.

Uneaten lunches and uncovered books fly,

everything slams, and blinded

we all get a good, fluorescent look at each other.

Here’s the latest 32 Poems magazine interview, which posted on the Poetry Blog of 32 Poems on May 5. Let’s get your appetite hungry for more. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Erika Meitner:

1. Not only are you a contributor to 32 Poems, but you are also a professor at Virginia Tech and you are completing a doctorate in Religious Studies. What “hat” do you find most difficult to wear and why?

Right now the hardest of these–between teaching in a relatively new job, trying to write poems during the semester, reading all the applications to our MFA program, advising students, and mothering a toddler–is finding the time in the day to work on my doctoral research. Happily, that’s what they make summers for. It’s also hard to peel off my professor-identity, in the sense that when I meet with my religion professors, I have to inhabit my role as a student again. It’s humbling and good for me though–it reminds me, on a fairly regular basis, of how my own graduate students feel.

2. Your biography mentions that your grandparents survived concentration camps in Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Mauthausen. Have those stories and experiences influenced your poetry or writing? Please Explain.

I think the way that my grandparents’ experiences have influenced my work the most is that there’s always been this deep well of silence around my family history. My grandmother didn’t start talking about the war and her experiences in it until well into her 80’s, when different foundations started coming around with video cameras to record survivors’ stories. Until then–until I was in college–I had never heard about her war experiences.

When I was little, she used to tell me that the numbers on her arm were her phone number, written there so she wouldn’t forget it. Part of me writing about her in my first book was, I suspect, part of my concerted effort to combat that silence. But she also had a real streak of black humor, and I definitely think that shows up a lot in my work as well.

When I write about uncomfortable or difficult situations in my poems, I tend to temper them a bit with small moments of situational humor, to give the audience that permission to laugh. She passed away, though, on Mother’s Day of last year, so I’ve been writing elegies to her that take various forms. One of them, “Godspeed,” just came out in the most recent issue of Washington Square.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I’m obsessed with Easter candy–particularly slightly stale marshmallow peeps. I think of peeps as sort-of guardian angels–the bunnies just look so benevolent, kind, and wise. I keep them everywhere. I have boxes of them that students have given me as gifts taped to my office wall; I have a yellow stuffed-animal bunny peep in the cupholder of my Civic who functions as a co-pilot of sorts. I realize this is weird. I also often gift people with peeps.

4. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any “writing” books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott).

When I teach poetry workshops, I love to use Steve Kowit’s book In the Palm of Your Hand. I find outside mini-research projects much more inspiring though, in terms of my own work. I’m currently really into Robert Smithson’s work, especially
his essays. Also, Joshua Lutz’s “Meadowlands” photos, and a book by Iain Borden called Skateboarding, Space and the City.

In terms of my own writing process, I currently belong to two virtual writing groups. One is constant, and it’s a password-protected blog where a few other poets and I post exercises and the poems that we write from them. This tends to get more active when the semester gets less busy, as most of us teach. I have another virtual group that’s a closed Google group. We pick 2-week or month-long chunks about twice a year to meet online, and when we meet, we write intensely–usually a poem-a-day. It came out of the NaPoWriMo idea, but we usually tend to meet in the summer for a month, and over winter break for a few weeks, as again, most of us teach and April (which is actually officially Poetry Month) tends to be too hectic in the academic calendar for anyone to get much writing done. We don’t comment on each other’s work, but I think we all like the group accountability of these virtual communities, and the fact that they help mitigate the loneliness of plugging away on your own a bit.

About the Poet:

Erika Meitner attended Dartmouth College, Hebrew University on a Reynolds Fellowship, and the University of Virginia, where she received her M.F.A. in 2001 as a Henry Hoyns Fellow.

She’s received additional fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (2002, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009), the Blue Mountain Center (2006), and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (John N. Wall Fellowship, 2003).

Her latest book is Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore.

Want to find out what Erika’s writing space looks like? Find out what she’s working on now, her obsessions, and much more. Check out the rest of my interview with Erika here. Please feel free to comment on the 32 Poems blog and Savvy Verse & Wit.

***Giveaway Reminders***

Giveaway for Eleanor Bluestein’s Tea & Other Ayama Na Tales short story collection, here; Deadline is May 6, 2009, 11:59 PM EST.

1 copy of Rubber Side Down Edited by Jose Gouveia, here; Deadline is May 15 at 11:59 PM EST

Interview With Poet Hadara Bar-Nadav

I’ve been working on a interview project with Deborah at 32 Poems magazine, and she kindly allowed me to interview past contributors to the magazine. We will be posting the interviews throughout the coming months, and our ninth interview posted on Deborah’s Poetry Blog of 32 Poems on April 20. I’m going to provide you with a snippet from the interview, but if you want to read the entire interview, I’ll provide you a link for that as well. For now, let me introduce to you 32 Poems contributor, Hadara Bar-Nadav.

ALARM PLEASURES INTO HUM
Published in Verse 23.1-3 (2006).

Mutiny awakens me,
the kingdom buzzing with saws,
all the fetishes abloom

which means a rubbing away until
blood or speech, each
to his own bright unraveling.

Red lives here, a nest
of nerves and twigs.
Doors unhinge and the roof

speckled with stars:
holes, navels, scars.

I have no floor,
no caviar, no mints.

I am humble as a tooth
and hunger.

And you are the messenger
without bell or tongue.

You are the messenger.

Come. Come.

1. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any “writing” books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott).

Books of poetry and art have been my best teachers, along with studying music. Jazz was my first teacher, I believe. Though I had written poetry since I was a child, it was when I was a teenager and started listening to jazz that I really started to study language, to think about its rhythms and sounds, and to wonder what I could do with language, how far I could push it.

I didn’t have an active writing community until I went to graduate school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Now that I live in Kansas City, I meet informally with a few poets and we discuss each other’s work. I also email poems to friends for feedback, if needed.

As for books on craft, I like Tony Hoagland’s Real Sofistikashun, which I use in my poetry workshops. Hoagland is smart, has a sense of humor, and doesn’t take himself too seriously.

2. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don’t listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

Generally, I don’t listen to music when I read or write. It’s too distracting. However, PJ Harvey, Beck, and the soundtrack to The Royal Tennenbaums have all figured into my manuscripts. The rise and fall and various intensities of PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire helped me come up with the final configuration of my first book, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight.

3. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

Chocolate. And Jersey pizza, bagels, and cannolis, which I miss now that I live in the Midwest.

As far as keeping myself pumped up, when I’m not writing, I revise. When I’m not revising, I send out. Or I read, or go to a museum, or get art books from the library. I’m not sure chocolate helps me do any of these things, but I like it. A lot.

About the Poet:

Hadara Bar-Nadav’s book of poetry A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007) won the Margie Book Prize. Recent publications appear or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Verse, and other journals. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Of Israeli and Czechoslovakian descent, she currently lives in Kansas City with her husband Scott George Beattie, a furniture maker and visual artist.

Want to find out what Hadara’s writing space looks like? Find out what she’s working on now, her obsessions, and much more. Check out the rest of my interview with Hadara here. Please feel free to comment on the 32 Poems blog and Savvy Verse & Wit.

Interview With Poet Dan Albergotti

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

by Dan Albergotti

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

“Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale” by Dan Albergotti from The Boatloads.© BOA Editions, Ltd., 2008.

I’ve been working on a interview project with Deborah at 32 Poems magazine, and she kindly allowed me to interview past contributors to the magazine. We will be posting the interviews throughout the coming months, and our eighth interview posted on Deborah’s Poetry Blog of 32 Poems on March 31. I’m going to provide you with a snippet from the interview, but if you want to read the entire interview, I’ll provide you a link for that as well. For now, let me introduce to you 32 Poems contributor, Dan Albergotti :

1. Not only are you a contributor to 32 Poems, you are a professor of English at Coastal Carolina University and have a full-length collection of poems published called The Boatloads. You also have an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Literature. Do you think poets have an easier time getting published with higher credentials? Why or Why not? Also of your “hats,” which do you find most difficult to wear and why?

Over the years, I’ve occasionally heard this suspicion that having a good cover letter can get you “in” at magazines and presses. I just don’t buy it. Only the work matters to editors. And if a lot of people being published have degrees in creative writing, isn’t there a rival hypothesis to the idea that the degree “got them in”? Doesn’t it make sense that someone who committed two-to-four years of his of her life to study writing at a post-graduate level might just have developed abilities to the point that he or she is writing poems worthy of being published?

I do wear a lot of hats, and it’s difficult in the sense that it stretches my economy of time very thin. But I’m lucky in that every hat I wear–as writer, teacher, editor–is wonderful, so it’s hard to apply the word “difficult” to any of it. I’m blessed, really.

2. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

This will be my “J” response: Joy Division, Jack Gilbert, John Keats, Joss Whedon, Jeff Mangum (of Neutral Milk Hotel). I might be obsessed with the tenth letter of the alphabet.

3. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don’t listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

I don’t really have any routines or playlists, but I love your question, and since you opened the door with your invitation of a “top five,” I will seize the opportunity to list my five favorite albums of all time, if for no other reason than to promote them to other people:

The Clash, London Calling

Radiohead, OK Computer

R.E.M., Murmur

Joy Division, Closer

Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane over the Sea

While these aren’t necessarily playing when I’m writing, they are all albums that I find inspiring. I remember that great moment at the 2008 Oscars when Glen Hansard, at the end of his acceptance speech for best original song, exhorted the millions watching to “Make art, make art, make art!” When I listen to these five albums, I want to make art in any way I can. And that’s always a good feeling.

4. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

Lately I’ve been writing in form a good bit, which is something I haven’t done in a while (all the poems in The Boatloads are free verse). But I’ve been writing new free verse poems as well. I have a very general idea of the shape that my second full-length manuscript will take based on the kinds of poems I’ve been writing. I don’t have a systematic project to fill a collection, and I tend to avoid such thoughts of larger structures when writing poems. So I’m afraid I have little more detail to provide than “I’m writing poems.”

About the Poet:

Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. In 2008, his poem “What They’re Doing” was selected for Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, Albergotti currently teaches creative writing and literature courses and edits the online journal Waccamaw at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina.

Want to find out what Dan’s writing space looks like? Find out what he’s working on now, his obsessions, and much more. Check out the rest of my interview with Dan here. Please feel free to comment on the 32 Poems blog and Savvy Verse & Wit.

Also, check out this interview with Dan on How a Poem Happens.

Interview With Poet Jehanne Dubrow

From the Fever-World
By Jehanne Dubrow

In the fever-world, my dearest,

our hands aren’t clean

for very long, the brambles

biting in our palms,

deep thorns across our life lines–

here, even the shrub

surrendering fruit to the picker

resents the sacrifice and wants

its juices given back in blood.

if you are hungry, starve yourself.

Make a desert of your thirst.

Don’t fall asleep

Here, my dearest,

there’s only wilderness where fields

should be, only the blackberries

concealing knives,

cherries pitted with buckshot

to choke the unsuspecting throat,

and peaches whose centers hold

dark stones of cyanide.

– first appeared in The Barn Owl Review

I’ve been working on a interview project with Deborah at 32 Poems magazine, and she kindly allowed me to interview past contributors to the magazine. We will be posting the interviews throughout the coming months, and our seventh interview posted on Deborah’s Poetry Blog of 32 Poems on March 13. I’m going to provide you with a snippet from the interview, but if you want to read the entire interview, I’ll provide you a link for that as well. For now, let me introduce to you 32 Poems contributor, Jehanne Dubrow :

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I suppose one of the most interesting things about me is my nomadic childhood. I was born in a little town in Northern Italy and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. Oh, and when I twenty-years-old, I played a gangrenous valley girl in the movie An American Werewolf in Paris (sadly, I ended up on the cutting room floor). I still remember my line: “Claude’s parties are wack!!!”

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why? Also, do you believe that writing can be an equalizer to help humanity become more tolerant or collaborative? Why or why not?

For me, written poetry has the emotional force expected of spoken word and performance poetry, while also having a life on the page. I haven’t seen evidence that writing makes us more tolerant or collaborative. Writers tend to be a critical bunch—our craft depends on having a sharp eye and a small sliver of ice in the heart.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I have an odd mix of obsessions, half scholarly and half not-so-much: Holocaust studies, American Jewish literature, my dog Argos, midcentury modern design, and Hermes scarves.

4. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Nowhere else in the world do people worry or complain about the elitism of poetry. When Americans complain that poetry is elitist, what they’re really addressing is the strong strain of anti-intellectualism in this country. Americans don’t like to feel stupid, and poetry often makes them feel stupid. I don’t think poetry needs to become less elitist; I think we need to do a better job teaching students how to read poems or, for that matter, how to look at paintings, how to listen to operas, how to watch ballets.

From the Spring Issue of 32 Poems by Jehanne Dubrow:

FRAGMENT FROM A NONEXISTENT YIDDISH POET
Ida Lewin (1906-1938)
AlwaysWinter, Poland

2.

Each year, the chill creeps in
By June, our eaves sharp
with iron icicles, our windows
rattling like teeth against the cold
AlwaysWinter we call this town
because the ground won’t thaw,
no matter how we press skin
to skin, make a fire from
this friction we call love.
Thistles remain needles, each blade
of grass a blade that slices
to our soles AlwaysWinter
we say to justify the frozen places
everywhere—the constant
the wind, the tundra buried
deep inside our bones

Want to find out what Jehanne’s writing space looks like? What music she listens to while she writes? Find out what she’s working on now, her obsessions, and much more. Check out the rest of my interview with Jehanne here. Please feel free to comment on the 32 Poems blog and Savvy Verse & Wit.

Jehanne Dubrow’s Bio:

Jehanne Dubrow’s work has appeared in Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, and Prairie Schooner. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Hardship Post, winner of the Three Candles Press First Book Prize (2009), and a chapbook, The Promised Bride (Finishing Line 2007). A second collection, From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Award and will be published in 2009. Her third poetry collection, Stateside, will be released by Northwestern University Press in 2010.

***GIVEAWAY REMINDER***

I also have two copies of Diana Raab‘s My Muse Undresses Me and one copy of Dear Anaïs: My Life in Poems for You. Deadline is March 18 at 5PM EST.

One gently used ARC of Reading by Lightning by Joan Thomas; Deadline is March 20 at Midnight EST.