32 Poems Magazine » poetry interviews

Andrew Kozma: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Serena — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 05:00:28 +0000

Poet Andrew Kozma

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?

Where is this crowd and how do I convince them to follow me around from reading to reading?

I’m a poet because that’s what I went to graduate school for and that what I have the most publications in, but I think of myself generally as a writer. I started writing seriously (i.e. regularly) in high school while in an English magnet school program. They had us write poems, stories, plays, essays, reviews, everything really that could be thrown under the term “writing” except for novels.

And that’s continued. In addition to poems, I have had stories, essays, plays, and reviews published. Plays of mine have been performed by small companies. Most recently I’ve been trying to get an agent for a Young Adult novel.

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why?

I seem them as powerful in different ways. Spoken word and performance poetry have more to do with the skill of the writer as a performer than they do with the power of the poetry itself. A brilliant performer can bring you to tears with your tax return. Because of this, it’s hard to tell from a performance whether the poetry stands on its own as poetry because the voice of the performer gets in the way. In addition, spoken word is crowd-oriented, meaning that your reaction is somewhat determined by the reactions of those around you. It’s a communal experience.

Written poetry, on the other hand, is intensely private. Even if you like the same poets and love the same books as another person, chances are that you are receiving different things from the poems, and that those things are different than what the writer intended. Text is like e-mail in this: the skill of the writer narrows the field of what the reader interprets, but it is still an interpretation.

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

General obsessions or writerly ones?

Generally, I’m obsessed with bad films (and generally interested in bad art of all kinds). I co-founded a bad movie club at my undergraduate school and have roped people into watching horrible films with me wherever I’ve moved. It’s sad, I suppose, that I’m always more interested in watching a bad movie than a good one (or, at least, one that is seen as “good” by the general populace). But people always want to watch what’s good. Where’s the love for the bad?

In writing, I find myself obsessed with extreme situations. An early poem of mine was inspired by nuns who “cut off their noses and lips to avoid violation.” More recently I’ve written about the Japanese Giant Hornet: a swarm of thirty can kill thirty thousand bees in a matter of hours.

More generally, I’m obsessed with form regardless of what genre I’m writing in. I try to treat everything I write as an experiment, pushing myself in a direction that I have yet to fully explore. In poetry, this means often writing in traditional forms, but also, more truthfully, that every poem I write inhabits a form even if it’s not immediately recognizable.

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).

I belong to a writing group now for working on novels, but this is relatively new to me. My default learning vehicle for writing has been the academic workshop from freshman year of high school to my last years of my Ph.D. It’s true that, now, I would have to say that I find my writing group more helpful than workshops, but the reason for that is because all the people involved are experienced writers, have workshop experience, and like each other’s work. The writing group is really only an evolution of the workshop for me. The first thing I learned about workshops is that you quickly have to determine whose comments are useful to you and to filter out the rest, essentially creating your own private writing group within the larger workshop context.

The writing books that I enjoyed most are Burning Down the House by Charles Baxter and Stephen King’s On Writing. I don’t really like reading straight how-to books on writing. Both of those books are more a symptom of the way I do like to approach learning about writing book-wise: criticism. King’s Danse Macabre. Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. James Blish’s Issues at Hand, and a Collections of essays by William Logan and Randall Jarrell.

5. 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?

This idea always strikes me as a little odd, because as much as people may consider poetry elitist or inaccessible, poetry is also the one form of writing most people have written on their own and that most people believe they can write. It is probably the most democratic of genres. Journals are filled with poems of rage and pathos. Love poems are treasured not because of their art but because of their emotion. Poems written for elegies or for weddings have their verbal power reinforced by their context.

The reason, I think, that poetry continues to be seen as inaccessible is that the particular language and structure of poetry is purposefully acquired rather than naturally learned. What I mean is that once we learn to read, we are constantly bombarded with prose. Stories and novels make sense because they are, in general, little different than what we are reading every day. The language of poetry is generally at odds with normal speech, is unnatural in the way it plays with syntax and sound, and is much more accepting of language that stretches the limits of sense. The only real way to dispel the myth of poetry being inaccessible would be to include more exposure to poetry in schools and in popular culture.

6. 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’m often inspired by music, but I don’t often listen to it while I’m writing. Or, to be more exact, I don’t listen to specific music. Most of the time I’m writing in a public space (see below) and so the music I’m listening to is determined by those who own the space. When I’m looking to get inspired, bands that’ll move me to write are The Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie, and Blue Öyster Cult.

When I was in high school I wrote a play in a weekend only listening to a single song of Enya’s on repeat. What was that song? Why Enya? How was I actually able to keep focused for that long? All these questions and more will fail to be answered.

7. 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?

Sure, my friendships have changed because since I’ve been focusing on my writing I’ve been surrounded by writers. The very nature of graduate school means that most of the friends I’ve gained over the past ten years have been, in some way, related to writing.

But if the question you so slyly phrased actually means what I will now interpret it to mean, i.e. How have my friendships changed since I graduated from graduate school and tried to work on writing as full-time as possible? then here is my answer.

I think they have gotten worse. Or at least that’s my fear. So much of my social life – whether I go out and have said social life – is dependent on whether I feel like I get enough writing done during the day. In fact, part of the reason that most of my friends are and continue to be writing related is that friends can often only find me at a coffee shop, working, and those friends are often writers who stay there and work with me. Conversation is there, but it’s sidelined by the camaraderie of writing together.

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

By riding my bike to my preferred writing space, and making sure that writing space is outside of my house (see below).

I used to play soccer pretty regularly – and would love to again – but writing and thinking about writing has eaten up all my time. Well, that and my job is weekend-oriented, the same days I’d be playing soccer if I wasn’t earning a living instead.

9. 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?

Coffee. And I don’t mean coffee in the sense that I need the caffeine to kickstart my heart or to keep me going – I drown my coffee in cream and sugar – it’s more that I like to have something hot at hand while writing. Drinking it (slowly) gives me something to do, and the heat from what I’m drinking makes me feel active. I think it has something to do with the fact that a hot beverage is a sort of clock. It only stays hot for so long.

Similar to the countdown inherent in a cooling cup of coffee, I use time to overcome writer’s block. When working, I’ll say that I have to write for a certain amount of time – when working on my novel it was two hours a day – and for that time I actually have to be writing. Yes, in theory, I could be staring at a blank screen for those two hours. In practice, if you set me in front of a computer and I have no other way to distract myself, I’ll begin stringing words together. Of course, whether those words will be coherent is anybody’s guess.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

My current writing space is Inversion Coffee. It’s a coffee shop (as you might’ve already guessed) but it has a pretty high turnover of patrons and draws a lunch crowd during the week with food trucks in the parking lot.

I suppose you might wonder why those are desirable to me in a writing space. If you are so wondering, the answer is that I need to be distracted. If I’m not mildly distracted by other people, by things to see and noise to filter out, then I end up endlessly distracting myself. Although I’ve been able to do work at home in the past, it’s far more difficult for me then getting writing done while in a busy, noisy environment.

Ideally, I’d be working at a café rather than a coffee shop. There are two reasons for this. One is that a place that focuses on food is likely to be busier than a coffee shop, and therefore’ll give me more distractions for the eye and ear. The second reason is that restaurants are less likely to have wireless internet, thereby nipping another major distraction in the bud.

Lastly, my ideal writing space would have free coffee and food. Which means I’ll probably have to own the place.

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

Currently, I’m doing the Write 1 Sub 1 challenge where those involved write a story a week and submit a story a week (luckily, it doesn’t have to be the same story). Inspired by that, I started a similar thing with some poet friends, just writing a poem a week.

Outside of that I’m working on revising a novel I wrote a few years ago. It’s hard going since I find it nearly impossible to read what I’ve written if I think there are issues with it, and working my way back through this novel is like walking hip deep in snow. The good thing is that I find I like what I’ve written pretty well after I’ve reread it. Strangely, that hasn’t kept me from dreading what I still have yet to read and revise.

Thanks to Andrew for answering my questions. Please do check out a sample of his work below:

A Firm Belief in Unfettered Joy

Here is what I was going to tell you:
The Dalstroi orchestra played for them
as they approached over the ice
that had caught fast the ship
transporting the prisoners
through winter
to Magadan.

Here is what it was going to mean:
Even so, even here, even without knowledge.
There is joy in an attempt at joy by the Dalstroi
orchestra forced by the camp supervisors
to welcome with music those survivors
who saw the sun shining beneath the ice.

Here is the space between:
A siren carries itself across the city.
Against the pale grey sky, the dark branch.
The litter of dead petals on the church floor.
After the explosion, the absolute silence.
Snow becomes the icing on the earth.
Where the footprints stop, beauty lies untouched.

Temple Cone: An Interview With Serena Agusto-Cox

Serena — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:15:34 +0000

Poet Temple Cone, published in 32 Poems

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 love telling people that I’m a poet. Just a poet. Not vaguing it up by saying that I’m a “writer” or qualifying it by adding that I’m a professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy. I think that, deep down, people appreciate the uselessness of poetry, its lack of clear market value and profit potential. “For poetry makes nothing happen,” as Auden said in his elegy for Yeats, adding a little later that poetry is “a way of happening, a mouth.” For just a moment, they encounter something that can’t really be bought and sold, or at least not dearly. Some people feel a bit threatened by that, or indifferent to it, but most are curious, and then a little amazed, as if they’d just met someone who could photosynthesize and therefore didn’t need to spend time working in order to buy food. Of course, the question “How can you live on that?” inevitably comes up, to which I always say, “Prize money.” That way they get the impression that they’ve met a really good poet. And who knows, maybe they’ll look me up.

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’ve been present at some spoken word performances that were full of energy and proved to be both entertaining and artistically satisfying. But performances are really of the moment; I don’t find they translate well to film, though oddly enough I think that sound recordings of readings can have real force (the way Alan Lomax’s recordings of Southern music from the 1940s and 50s have the power to blow away contemporary recordings with their authenticity and presence). But I believe the written word lasts longer, even if it languishes on a shelf in a used bookstore, and that it generates a dialogue between reader and writer that simply can’t be had in a live reading. And one need only read Shakespeare’s Sonnets to see that the written word is not dead, but alive and awhirl, a sort of quantum cloud of meaning awaiting a moment of attention to fix its meaning before it swirls back up again.

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

OK, I like to think of myself as a fairly sane, stable person, but I have to admit, even to myself, that I’m obsessed with the number. In Hebrew, the number 18 is associated with the word for ‘life,’ Whenever I open a book of poems, the first page I turn to is 18, or if the book begins on a different page, the equivalent of the 18th page. If a poem of mine is published on the 18th page of a journal, I get absurdly happy. And I’ve just finished a book manuscript of poems all 18 lines in length. I was born on the 18th of October, so I think that’s where it started; it pleases me to no end that my birthday is the feast day of St. Luke, the patron saint of doctors and of artists. “In the deserts of the heart / Let the healing fountain start,” says Auden.

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).

I completed two graduate degrees in creative writing (one at Hollins, one at UVA), and while I’d say I write quite differently from how I wrote back then, I think that those workshop experiences were crucial for me, because they allowed me to accelerate through many styles (and errors) that likely would have taken me a decade to reach, let alone write through. Before that time, I was a bit isolated as a writer (I wasn’t even an English major in college), but I was lucky in the writing books I encountered, and a few have stuck with me. When I began writing poetry in college, a close professor friend of mine sent some of my poems to James Merrill, who was a good friend of his. Merrill sent me some very encouraging letters, along with a copy of John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason, which I read religiously for years. Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town was a wonderful practical aid, and Hugo’s wry gruffness made him a good companion during less productive stretches. I’m also truly thankful for my copy of Walter Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, which I delve into constantly, stunned by the marvelous ways our words refer to ‘the things of this world.’ And these days, the book that’s most on my mind is Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry; Bly is wonderful when one doesn’t take him too seriously.

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?

Well, I have to question the initial premise, which really seems to be the attitude of readers when they are in school (a rather surprising and disappointing failure, don’t you think?). Away from the classroom, there are many non-academics and non-writers who read poetry of all sorts and who respond to it in genuine, acute, and thoughtful ways. I don’t mean to universalize, but I think there’s a basic human need for moving rhythms, surprising language, and sophisticated wordplay, and while it’s satisfied for many of us as children with nursery rhymes and folk songs, it seems neglected when we enter the adult world. While I’m sure there are those who find poetry “elitist and inaccessible,” I also think that they’re a minority and not much of a problem (cranks are cranks, no matter what they’re cranky about). The problem lies with those who dismiss or chasten poetry indirectly or inadvertently, either by assuming that readers aren’t interested in enjoying linguistic sophistication, regardless of the thought behind it (academics), or by assuming that they aren’t capable of such appreciation in the first place (major publishing houses). Because academics and publishers have such market control, I think they’re much more responsible than the reading public for the proliferation of this myth of inaccessibility.

But, ultimately, I think it’s a false controversy, much like the ‘death of poetry,’ and I don’t think poets need to bother with the matter. Like the moon, the popularity of poetry waxes and wanes, but it doesn’t ever go out (Homer, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Whitman, Dickinson, etc., still matter). The one thing that poets could stand to do, however, would be to change the way they conduct public readings; it’s surprising how much these resemble the paper presentations given at academic conferences. I don’t mean that they need to create a full-out performance, but they might consider borrowing from revival preachers, stand-up comics, children’s story time readers, and the crazy literature professors they loved in college, rather than from the 20-minute talk by the intellectually anxious and self-defensive graduate student. And major writers might try reading at truly minor venues from time to time, to encourage initiates and to remind themselves of the broader audience they complain they’ve lost.

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?

Most days I write very early in the morning (around 4am), before my wife and daughter are awake. I don’t listen to any music then, because I rather like the silence in the house, and I like listening as the morning comes alive with bird song. When I’m revising, however, I’m more apt to listen to music, though it usually can’t have any words. I especially like heavily patterned instrumental music, so Bach’s often on the list, but I’m also keen on modern and contemporary classical, so I listen to a lot of John Tavener, Philip Glass, and Arvo Part. One of my favorite contemporary pieces to revise to is Eleni Karaindrou’s Ulysses’ Gaze, which is very somber and haunting, but reassuring, too.

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?

Because I’ve been in academic settings for most of my adult life, I’ve had the chance to meet and know a lot of writers, so I don’t think I’ve made any more or any fewer friends since I committed to poetry. I’m friendly with many poets, but most of my close friends are ‘non-writers,’ i.e. normal people.

How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

I run (rather slowly these days), and whenever I’m stalled on a line, I do push-ups. Eat well, etc. Try to stay away from booze, but coffee’s another story.

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?

Can’t think of any inspiring foods, though I love fresh figs. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as writer’s block. There’s only the refusal to think up new ways to trick yourself into writing. When I need a boost, I like to visit workplaces that have their own tradition-laden vocabulary, a separate language for “all their gear and tackle and trim.” Places like riding stables, bait shops, butcher’s stands (there’s the inspirational food, I guess). Or I read through field guides and ask my wife (who’s a botanist) to tell me about wildflowers. If I’m really, really stalled with work of my own, I copy other poets’ poems into my journal. To see one of Seamus Heaney’s Glanmore sonnets in my own hand?—now that’s inspiring. I might even come to forget that I didn’t write it, and then my confidence soars and I’m back on the path.

Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I’m not particular about my writing space anymore, although I used to be. These days, the kitchen table or the sofa in our living room are enough. Once upon a time, I needed a big desk, a wall with no window or pictures, and a shelf of books and dictionaries close at hand. Now it’s enough simply to have a quiet hour or two to draft. I guess if I had a genie’s wish, I’d take an old Dutch-style farmhouse, with whitewashed walls, low ceilings, dark corners, big hayfields, and a distant woods where I could go walking when I needed.

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

I’ve recently finished a book-length manuscript of poems in a form I’ve come to call the blyzal, a form that Robert Bly developed in two of his recent books of poetry. (Bly is a guilty pleasure of mine; the title of my book, in fact, is The Trouble with Iron John). The poems are in a modified form of the classic Persian ghazal, a form I’ve always found a bit fussy and prim, in spite of its alleged disunities. When I read Bly’s versions of the ghazal, however, I got excited by how the longer stanzas allowed for a fuller range of associations, subjects, and imaginative leaps. The three-line stanzas just seemed bigger, shaggier, messier than what one usually sees with ghazals, and since they were each eighteen lines in length, I was hooked. The poems have been well received by journals, with acceptances by Virginia Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Albatross, Kennesaw Review, Barnwood, The Humanist, storySouth, and 32Poems. Since it’s the final poem in the collection, I think I’ll end with the one that appeared in 32Poems. Thanks so much for inviting me to write on the blog!

No Loneliness by Temple Cone

A Psalm Before Healing

A bowl of noodles with oil and sesame on a drizzly night,

A mug of scalding coffee, a braid of chala from the neighbor,

These small services uphold the firmament of stars, selah.

Never forget that the dove grieves but won’t share her story.

The hunters never understand. When she bolts skyward,

She is the skiff the exile rows through morning rain, selah.

How lissom the homerun swing of the left-handed catcher,

As if his bat had caught a comet’s arc and made it shine.

He shall never read this poem or know his own grace, selah.

With its notched legs, the Jerusalem cricket can’t help but sing.

The Alps can’t help but storm. The corn can’t help but grow.

The world is a second language we can’t help but speak, selah.

Once healed, the blind must be taught the ways of vision.

Diamonds in a green cloud are sunlight showing through leaves.

They learn, but dream of seeing in the dark once more, selah.

Just when you think you’re coming to the end of these poems,

Of your life, of a bowl of noodles, there’s an unexpected sweetness,

A last trace of oil you can sop with a handful of bread, selah.

Kelle Groom: An Interview With Serena Agusto-Cox

Serena — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:00:04 +0000

Poet Kelle Groom, published in 32 Poems

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 also write personal essays/memoir. For the last year, I’ve been poetry editor for The Florida Review, and have now shifted into an advisory editor position. I work full-time as the Grants & Communications Manager for Atlantic Center for the Arts, an international artists-in-residence program in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Prior to this, I was the Director of Grants Administration for the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida.

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?

Spoken word can be electrifying. But I encounter performance poetry occasionally; I live with the written word.

I do believe that literature can encourage tolerance and awareness of our shared humanity. In my writing, I’m trying to find my way to some kind of truth, to discover something new.

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

Writing, of course. And books. Coffee. Oceans. Ireland. Prehistory.

Workshops of course were part of my BA, MA, and MFA courses of study. I also took incredibly helpful workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center and through Atlantic Center for the Arts’ artists-in-residence program. I have a few really great, trusted readers – dear friends, who I share my work with. But the idea of attending a writing group makes me queasy.

Books have been very helpful. I love Bird by Bird, and The Practice of Poetry (Robin Behn and Chase Twichell). Kenneth Koch’s Rose, where did you that red? is for teaching poetry to children, but I love that too. Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms is a pleasure.

Excellent resources on form: Mark Strand and Eavan Boland’s The Making of the Poem and Philip Dacy and David Jauss’ Strong Measures. Other important resources, Boland’s Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, Strand’s The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention, Adrienne Rich’s What is Found There, Carolyn Forche’s Against Forgetting, Peter Sacks’ The English Elegy, Alicia Ostriker’s Stealing the Language, Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone’s A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now.

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 so various, I think it’s just about finding the poets and poems that matter to you. Poems/collections that have seemed inaccessible to me, often open up later on. For me, it’s important to read as widely as possible and be open.

I created and ran a reading series for five years, while I was an adjunct instructor, among other jobs. The series grew to include monthly readings in an off-campus coffee house, an independent bookstore, and an art gallery, as well as craft lectures, writing workshops, annual writing contests, open themed readings, informal dinners. It was fun – there was a lot of poetry in the air. Accessibility was a goal, offering a wide range of readings by emerging and established writers on a regular basis in an intimate environment.

I always listen to music when I write, but feel weirdly secretive about it. A few of the pieces are Antony and the Johnsons cover of Dylan’s, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Gorecki’s Symphony # 3 with soprano Dawn Upshaw, especially the second movement (that should count for at least two…). Steve Earle’s Ft. Worth Blues, Jeff Buckley’s cover (and John Cale’s) of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. It’s pretty much the same songs/pieces for a year or so, regardless of the genre I’m writing in.

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?

I’ve always focused on writing. Almost all of my friends are artists, and most of them are writers.

How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

I like that you assume I’m fit and healthy! As a writer, I can’t go much longer than two weeks without writing –things start to fall apart. I’m happiest writing every day, for as long as possible. It’s important for me to read a great deal too, in all genres/various disciplines. For the most part, I’ll only do physical exercise if I love it. I live a block from the ocean – my favorite place. So, I go to the beach to bike, swim, and run, and the beauty of the place distracts me from the effort.

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?

Coffee is essential. Music, visual arts, reading, bike/run on beach.

Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I’ve just moved, so I haven’t really settled in yet. My “writing room” is a catastrophe as the house is small, with little storage. So the room is filled with suitcases, rollaway bed, a variety of large storage totes, and hundreds of books.

A giant tree blocks the one window. The whole combo is pretty claustrophobic. But I’ve made the sunny dining/living room my writing space, and I use the kitchen table. Which makes for kind of a messy house, but gives me a clear space to work. And it’s quiet here – I love that.

An ideal space would be less tight, and if I’m dreaming, I’d love to go home to Cape Cod, and live/write in a place in South Yarmouth or Dennis or Wellfleet.

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

My third poetry collection, Five Kingdoms, comes out this fall from Anhinga Press. I’m revising another poetry manuscript, and also just beginning a new collection. One of the first poems from that new collection will be out in POETRY this September and another in Ploughshares in December.

I’m also working on a memoir manuscript, City of Shoes. Selections from the memoir have recently appeared in AGNI, Brevity, Bloomsbury Review, New Madrid, and Witness. In August, another piece will appear in Ploughshares, and several chapters will be published by West Branch this fall.

Five Kingdoms by Kelle Groom

LOUD HOUSE

Het up boys, skitter boys, muttonchop
go-go boys, gurgle music, kidney stone

music, muchachos party, rubicon sand fire
flaring party, thunderbird ski hats in summer

party, sweaty head party, pound & thump,
socket burning beach party, orange forklift

beach, orange moon ba-boom, hooch smoke,
ta-ta smoke, stonkered house, pandemonium

tetherballed, turtle orbitted, oriflamme ant
house, rust hilled, I know I’m violating

myself house, Maybe you’ll see me
on MTV house, No, dude (to a dog) house,

evening knock knock knock knock
house, evening anamatter clink: glass and tin,

goo food jars, chest hammer music, earthmover,
dog bark music, beep beep back-up

talk, rag and straw sleep, panic sleep, dart
sleep, rummage, rumple, canyon sleep,

sulky bunco, mittenheaded boys, saw-
voiced reclamation boys, fumarole,

radio pale, tar breathing boys
in the chewed grass, white sail an exhale.

(originally appeared in 32 Poems; forthcoming in Five Kingdoms, Anhinga Press, 2009)

About the Poet:

Kelle Groom’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others. Her poetry collections are Five Kingdoms (Anhinga Press, 2009), Luckily, a 2006 Florida Book Award winner (Anhinga), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida).

She’s received awards from Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Millay Colony, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, United Arts of Central Florida, Volusia County Cultural Council, and New Forms Florida.

Claudia Burbank: An Interview With Serena Agusto-Cox

Serena — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:00:58 +0000

Poet Claudia Burbank, published in 32 Poems

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’ve come to writing after retiring from the corporate world (telecommunications). I was one of those road warriors you see running through the airport. I knew I was traveling too much when the airline crew celebrated my birthday. Lacking a background in English or writing I had to start from scratch. Reading has been a lifelong delight though.

I’m a graduate of Vassar College and a 30 year subscriber to the Metropolitan Opera in NYC. Few people know I’m proficient at wallpapering and installed a tub surround with sliding glass doors by myself.

I received a Fellowship in poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, won the Inkwell Award (Alice Quinn, judge), and had my work featured on Verse Daily. I’ve published about 90 poems so far, most recently in Subtropics, Hotel Amerika, and Passages North.

Most writers are better at writing than reading their work aloud which often tends to be dull, interminable, largely indistinguishable and unmemorable.

The written word tends to be more powerful and lasting and easier to grasp. Studies show that the brain is actively engaged in creating the experience when you read as opposed to being a passive listener. If your mind wanders you can simply start over.

On the second question: if only.

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

I tend to be obsessive about most things I do. This month that includes Ken Ken puzzles, keeping my teeth extra clean, and the adagio from Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto.”

Helen Vendler’s books were the most insightful and helpful. Workshops all depend on who’s giving them and how well matched you skill level is.

Living close to NYC I was fortunate to attend workshops at Poet’s House, the 92nd ST. Y, and the New School. Three were truly worth it and those teachers I stayed with; the others were enjoyable but I can’t truly say I learned anything. I was in two writing groups which were good for support and critique (both giving and receiving).

Again it depends on how well-matched you are to the skill level of the group.

5. 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?

Lord no.

Silence. No distractions. No phone.

7. 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?

Definitely more writers.

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

I walk an hour most days. Also I do arm curls with the laptop in its carrying case.

9. 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?

Good coffee. Dark chocolate. Lots of chocolate.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I work at the dining room table which looks out on my small town street. I’m often futzing around the kitchen or letting the cats in and out. My ideal writing space would be a soundproof windowless cell with a pipeline for coffee and chocolate.

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

Currently I’m exploring short fiction, both short shorts and longer stories, playing with voice, diction and POV.

Ann Fisher-Wirth: An Interview by Serena Agusto-Cox

Serena — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:00:56 +0000

Poet Ann Fisher-Wirth, published in 32 Poems

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’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.

I don’t see one form as more powerful than the others. Instead, I see some examples of each form as more powerful than others. They engage an audience in different ways. But the written poetry I love best has a strong oral and aural component—it is a rich pleasure to say it or hear it—and the spoken word poetry I admire most is full of verbal felicity and sophistication.

If writing helps humanity become more tolerant it is because it has stimulated a listener or reader to enter into the experience of a real or imaginary other, and to affirm what George Eliot calls the “equivalent center of consciousness” which is that other. “Collaborative,” in your question, I see as a red herring, for much of the world’s most important work is done in solitude. But certainly if we are led to imagine others, we may also learn to communicate with others rather than consign them to oblivion.

3. 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.

I’ve read many “writing” books over the years—Writing Down the Bones, Bird by Bird, The Practice of Poetry, The Poet’s Companion—and they have all been helpful, cheering, or inspiring in their various ways.

I am part of an online writing group through the (mostly) women’s listserv known as WomPo; in this small spinoff group we have not all met each other but we have become a very effective source of critiques (and loyal friendship) for each other.

Also I have a good friend/poet colleague with whom I share work—and both my husband and one of my daughters give me really good, tough feedback.

Finally, every few years I’ve been able to attend the poetry workshops at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. I was just there two weeks ago, in fact. It is absolutely amazing for one’s writing.

5. 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 don’t think poets have any obligation to do anything but write the best poems they can. Some of the greatest poetry is elitist and definitely inaccessible by mainstream readers. Some, equally great, is not.

As a poet, my obligation is to the poem. That seems a simple statement, but in truth what it means to serve any given poem in the process of its creation is enormously complex.

However, as a professor I take very seriously my opportunity to open poetry to students, and open students to poetry. All infants and children love poetry; it is bred in the bone. It is a great wrong that so many aspects of our culture stifle children’s appreciation of poetry as they get older. So I look upon my teaching as excavation. The love of poetry, the understanding of poetry—they’re down there, somewhere. The evidence is that even people who never read poems turn to poems to help them affirm and commemorate life’s great passages: birth, marriage, a society’s great tragedies, death.

I’m pretty crazy about silence. If I listen to music, it’s classical. Summer nights in Mississippi, I can’t help but listen to cicadas.

7. 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.

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

I walk quite a bit and do yoga. Also I am really lucky, in that my life is full of people and work that I love, and that plays an enormous role in well-being as one gets older.

9. 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?

Well I do drink a fair amount of coffee, and a day never passes without some cookie or another. I wouldn’t say “inspired” is exactly what they keep me, though. Nor am I particularly good at overcoming writer’s block; I suffer from it quite a bit. That’s why I went to Squaw Valley; you have to write a poem a day, and so many of the participants are such good writers that it would be mortifying not to hold your end up by writing something pretty good.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

My ideal writing space would be a rather large room in an old house very much like the house I live in, with bookcases that would store infinite numbers of books.

My actual writing spaces are rather cramped and I have used up every inch of available bookcases, but other than that, they are very nice. I have a computer at my office and a computer upstairs at home. I always finish poems at one of these. But I generally start poems in a journal, just scribbling, often with my nondominant hand.

One sine qua non for any space I would be able to write in is that it be natural—that is, made of things that occur in nature, like wood. Another is that I must have personalized it. Every object in my writing space (and in my living space altogether) has a history, evokes a place or person, triggers memories or sensory information; it is an extension of my mind and body. My mother was a painter and instilled in me a keen awareness of color, tone, atmosphere—both the aesthetics and the karma of place. My office at school is in a beautiful old building. My house is beautiful and old, quite unmodernized, full of quirks and crookedness, and I love that.

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

My third book of poems, Carta Marina, was published by Wings Press last April. I am delighted with the beautiful job they did, and I’m doing whatever I can to help support the book. Next December my chapbook Slide Shows will come out from Finishing Line Press, so I’ll be working to publicize that, too.

The huge project I’m working on is an anthology of contemporary ecopoetry, coedited with Laura-Gray Street, that Trinity University Press will publish in a couple of years. Also I’ve written many poems that have not yet come together as a book manuscript, and I am trying to find what the shape of that manuscript will be.

This fall, I’ll be busy teaching, but I’m on sabbatical next spring. Aside from visiting the splendidly burgeoning grandchildren, working on the anthology, and writing, I’ll also be giving some readings in Sweden—because Carta Marina is set in Sweden—and teaching for two months in Fribourg, Switzerland.

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 MÃ¤rsta 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.

ABOUT THE POET:

Ann Fisher-Wirth’s third book of poems, Carta Marina, appeared from Wings Press in April 2009. She is the author of Blue Window and Five Terraces and of the chapbooks The Trinket Poems, Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll, and (forthcoming) Slide Shows. With Laura-Gray Street she is coediting Earth’s Body, an international anthology of ecopoetry in English which Trinity University Press will publish in 2012.

Her poems appear widely and have received numerous awards, including the Rita Dove Poetry Award, a Malahat Review Long Poem Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award, and eight Pushcart nominations and a Special Mention. She has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden. She teaches at the University of Mississippi.

Thomas Stemmer: An Interview by Serena Agusto-Cox

Serena — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:00:30 +0000

Thomas Stemmer, Poet published in 32 Poems magazine

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 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.

Frankly, I do not know.

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

Yes: My mechanic typewriter. I JUST LOVE IT!

I have to admit that I am a very solitary poet. I do not know, if this is good or bad.

5. 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.

No, I do not listen to music while writing. I enjoy SILENCE very much!

7. 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?

I feel, there is more depth and goodwill in relationships now.

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

The daily spiritual exercises of my religion help me a lot. I am an Eckist (Eckankar).

9. 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.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I would love to write in a castle or in a medieval ruin or in any of these places of the early 19th century (little houses constructed for poetry readings by some crazy lovers of literature during the romantic period of history.)

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

A Trilogy of an unredeemed romantic in the German language (“Trilogie eines unbekehrten Romantikers”).

Nothing New Under the Sun

The small village

Was just boring,

Built for tourism only,

Just void.

Only one man was

Interesting:

David the Bookman.

As his name indicates,

He is selling books.

A nice guy. Old man, old books.

I liked him.

Alexandra Teague Interview by Serena Agusto-Cox

32poems — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:20:33 +0000

Editor’s Note: You might recall I wrote a post entitled “Alexandra Teague: A Poet You Should Know” and shared some of her poems. I’m especially delighted she allowed us to interview her for the blog.

—-

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.

I see spoken word and written poetry as differently powerful; many of the community college students I teach are interested in poetry because of hip hop and spoken word, and these students bring some wonderful understandings of rhyme and meter and wordplay from those genres. I love being able to return to a poem on the page and have it continue to compel me, but I think the connection to sound and the more directly participatory experience of spoken word can also be really powerful.

I do think writing is a powerful means of self expression, and of figuring out what we really believe, and what others might believe, and what we might want to imagine individually or societally. I don’t think of writing as equalizing exactly, but certainly allowing us to hear from one another, across time and space and experience, in ways we might not otherwise be able to.

3. 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.

I don’t usually read “writing” books, though I teach articles about writing process and theory, and I certainly learn from those, my students, and the advice that I give them (I really believe that teachers are always giving the advice that they themselves need to hear). I began the Stegner Fellowship almost ten years after I finished grad school, and during those intervening years, I hadn’t been part of a writing group. I definitely found the Stegner workshops extremely motivating: to have readers who were expecting to see new work every couple of weeks and who weren’t going to let me get away with sloppiness. I’m continuing to meet with both a poetry and a fiction group for that reason, and having careful, thoughtful readers, and being able to regularly discuss our projects and process, feels invaluable at this point.

5. 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?

As a teacher of composition, poetry, reading, and literature, I see a lot of very bright students who are deeply intimidated by poetry and believe that only certain people know how to decode it. I think this is a shame because once they’re forced to (or able to) overcome their fears, they often really enjoy poetry and find it relevant and fulfilling to read. I don’t think that poets should feel obliged to write “accessible” poetry, but I do think that some of us, particularly if we’re teachers, can help expose people to a wide range of poetry, dispel the myth that poetry is one thing, and let them know that even poets don’t understand all poems.

I don’t usually listen to music when I write, though my boyfriend, Dylan Champagne, is a musician, and his studio is under my writing room, so sometimes music is coming through the floorboards anyway. I go on occasional music-listening kicks, however. Recent albums on replay have been Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago and The National’s Boxer. The main thing that I need to write is a lot of time and headspace—i.e. I can’t be thinking about all the other things I need to do, and ideally I have a minimum of 4 hours free. Quiet is important to me when I’m first getting into a project; once I’m into it, I’m pretty oblivious, and have been known to write in moving cars, while walking, and other strange places.

7. 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?

I’ve always had a lot of friends who weren’t writers, which I think has helped keep me grounded and keep writing in perspective as an incredible way to communicate and live, not the way. These friends don’t talk about writing; they talk about life and books and other things that are way more interesting to write about than writing. That said, I’ve been really nurtured over the past few years by becoming better friends with more writers, through the Stegner and elsewhere, and it’s wonderful to be able to compare our challenges and talk about process and our work.

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

I became certified as a yoga instructor in December, and I practice yoga, at least briefly, every day. I also walk a lot. I haven’t owned a car in almost a decade, so I take public transportation and get great exercise walking up and down stairs in the Bart station, in my classroom buildings, etc. I feel fortunate to live in an area where I can get exercise while walking through a city full of interesting conversations and buildings and shifting sunlight—or hiking out in nature—rather than in a gym.

9. 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?

I eat fruit sometimes when I’m writing. And I drink coffee if it’s morning, and sometimes herb tea. As I said above, when I’m in the midst of writing, I’m bad about skipping meals, or eating whatever I can grab at the kitchen counter. Cheese and gulten-free crackers are a staple. I’ve never thought of foods keeping me inspired, however; maybe I need to look into that.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

My writing space has been pretty ideal for the past couple of years; I have an entire writing room for the first time in my life, with nice sunlight through the bay windows, a desk, and a red velvet chaise longue (really a fouton, but chaise longues are better for writing). I write on a laptop, so I also move around the house, and occasionally go out in the garden, or to coffee shops (though my laptop battery has been posing some limitations lately). My ideal space wouldn’t be half a block from a busy freeway, however, and would have amazing hiking trails and/or the ocean right outside.

11.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.

H.L. Hix Interview by Serena Agusto-Cox

32poems — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:06:52 +0000

H. L. Hix’s 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
T.S. Eliot Prize

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.

I used to, and I affirm the value of all those things, but these days I’m more interested in the challenge posed by work that seems inimitable, that creates its own criteria as if in defiance of how-tos or of group norming. Frank Bidart, Anne Carson, C. D. Wright, Jan Zwicky, Claudia Rankine, et al. Work about which it would be meaningful (if paradoxical) to say that it is not so much doing well what poetry does, but doing as poetry what poetry does not or ought not do, work the essential poetry-ness of which comes from its very other-than-poetry-ness, not from its fulfilling poetic precedent but from its testing or rejecting precedent. I’m not saying this well, which may be the point: I’m not persuaded that for poetry saying-well is the primary issue.
5. 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 doubt that it’s a myth. This question recalls for me the opening questions in this interview. TV commercials are non-elitist and accessible; anyone can follow their logic, without effort. Coors beer, therefore Coors twins. Got it. What is most accessible is precisely that which does not merely fail to evoke my highest capacities of thought and responsibility, but actively seeks to suppress them, to reduce me to my most passive and malleable. Watching a TV commercial is easy; reading Kierkegaard is hard, but it is hard because it challenges me to exercise my capacities to their fullest.

The word “exercise” suggests analogy between spiritual and physical health. Smoking a cigarette is easy, and can be done by anyone, without preparation; running five miles is hard, and must be prepared for, built up to. One diminishes my capacity to distribute oxygen to my tissues, and the other increases that capacity. To borrow a phrase from Ivor Gurney, “I believe in the increasing of life.” I want to be physically healthy enough to run five miles, and (analogously) I want to be spiritually healthy enough to read Kierkegaard. Watching TV commercials and smoking are easy and accessible, but marasmic and poisonous. Give me the difficult and inaccessible!

I couldn’t possibly write while listening to music. My first twenty years of teaching were in art colleges, and in that time I grew jealous of visual artists: most of them (in my experience) work while listening to music. I do have (many) routines and habits, all much too goofy and embarrassing to describe.

7. 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?

Many of my friends now are writers and artists. Probably this is natural enough, since so much of my life revolves around writing.

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

Thank you for the generosity of this question, its presumption that I am fit and healthy as a writer! I do try to stay physically fit and healthy, by obvious methods such as daily exercise, and I try to stay “writing fit” by equally obvious methods such as reading a lot. If there are any secrets, tricks, or shortcuts, I don’t know them.

9. 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?

I’m working to alter my diet, but for ethical and ecological reasons, rather than for reasons having to do primarily with my writing. I need ways to pump myself down, not up. I have far too many writing projects, more than I could tackle in a lifetime; I spend far too much of my life writing. I can’t remember the last time I had anything resembling writer’s block; I would be a better person if I had more writer’s block, not less.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I write at various places in the house (at a computer in one room for prose, at a different desk for correspondence, at another desk for poetry). My favorite spot is the “poetry place,” which has at least one thing in common with my ideal writing space: an old, beaten-up, solid-wood desk that belongs to my partner. Even though I live in Laramie, Wyoming, at 7,200 feet, my house is in town, so I see trees and other houses; my ideal writing space would have a view of the mountains.

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

My projects always sound absurd while I’m working on them, as my abysmal batting average at grant applications attests, so I’ll sidestep your kind invitation to describe the (absurd-sounding) project I’m working on now. How about if I mention instead a project that has been completed but has not yet been published? Called Incident Light, it is a verse biography of a close friend, the artist Petra Soesemann. When she was 49 years old, she learned that the father who had raised her was not her biological father. The father who had raised her, and who had passed away some years earlier, was (like Petra’s mother) a blue-eyed German blond, but as she — quite abruptly — learned, her biological father, who is still alive, is Turkish, with (like Petra herself) dark eyes and dark hair. I got interested in the questions raised by Petra’s situation: questions of personal identity, of secrecy and disclosure, of passion, and so on. Her story is inherently dramatic and interesting, and the book tries to explore it, to understand (as far as possible) what it must be like to experience such incitement to re-view one’s life, to re-situate one’s origins and re-map one’s entanglements.

Hadara Bar-Nadav Interview by Serena Agusto-Cox

32poems — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:42:49 +0000

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.
Read more.

1. You are a contributor to 32 Poems, but you are also an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. What “hat” do you find most challenging to wear and why?

My writing informs my teaching. What I figure out, struggle with, and am inspired by, I bring to my students. And certainly my teaching informs my writing. My students help me rethink what I think I know and remind me to start at the beginning and entertain possibility—a kind of idealism I lose if I listen to the news too much. Teaching and writing and publishing are challenging in different ways. I’m at my best when one informs the other.

This is an interesting question for me because I was a spoken word poet for a time. As a teenager, I used to slam at the Nuyorican on 3rd and Avenue B [in New York City]. Spoken and written poetry are both powerful. Spoken word makes wonderful use of rhythm and sound and is often political in nature. Of course, it can be contrived and predictable, but so can poetry on the page. I think spoken word can teach poetry on the page that it is alive—a wriggling live thing that is full of music. Poetry on the page can teach spoken word that you need more than good music and emotional content to drive a poem.

To respond to the second part of your question, I teach Black Women Writers and the Harlem Renaissance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and am always inspired by the premise of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement that art can affect change. Certainly, the Black Arts Movement was more about poetry for the people, poetry in the streets, in the schools, the kitchen, the bar, whereas the Harlem Renaissance was critiqued for its Talented Tenth values as elitist. Nevertheless, both movements shared the belief that art can affect change. And I know it does. I see it in my students. I hear them tell me how poetry changes the way they perceive language, speak, write, and see the world.

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

Chocolate, standard poodles, and James Brown. And going to museums. I painted for many years and studied art as an undergraduate and in graduate school. I enjoy going to museums and taking in other forms of communication. Ditto for aquariums.

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.

5. 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?

Obligation is a heavy word. I’m not sure that poetry has an obligation to anything other than to the poem itself. I write, publish, teach, and give readings. I suppose that’s my way of making poetry accessible or at least available to people. Of course, popular culture doesn’t tend to value things that take time, make you think too much, and don’t involve making money. That just means poetry has a lot of work to do to wake people out of their many modes of passivity. But writers can’t do this work alone.

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.

7. 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?

Much of my work as a writer is solitary, but I’ve always had many groups of friends. I think my insistence on friendship is both a counter to the solitary writer’s life and serves as family replacement, especially now that I live in the Midwest (most of my family is in NJ and Israel). I definitely have more writer friends than I’ve ever had, but I think it’s important to have a variety of friends, both writers and non-writers. My husband is a furniture maker and visual artist, and he is able to help me stay grounded and rediscover perspective when I lose it.

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

I work out at a gym several times a week. And I’m vegetarian. I also try to get outside and play with my dog. My dog and the gym help me keep cool. Talking to my husband and friends helps too.

9. 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.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I converted a bedroom in my house into an office and work on a gorgeous, huge dining table my husband made (we don’t currently have a dining room and no room for it elsewhere—lucky me!). My writing space is filled with books. I like having books around me when I write so I can move from reading to writing and back again. I fantasize about having a cork wall so that I can hang up poems on which I’m working and see them all at once. I’m a multitasker at heart and tend to work on a few poems at a time.

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

I’m currently working on a new manuscript, tentatively titled Radio Nurse. This manuscript was inspired by my many years as a medical editor. (The poem that was published in 32 Poems, “Ode to Lymph Nodes,” is part of this manuscript). I’m also trying to find a good home for my second book Architecture at the Mouth. I have an anthology project I’ve been thinking about, too, and a story I’m revising. I guess you could say I’ve been keeping myself busy.

Jehanne Dubrow Interviewed by Serena Agusto-Cox

32poems — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:23:54 +0000

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 (see photo), 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.

A poem of hers appears at the end of this interview.

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!!!”

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.

When I need inspiration, I read the poems that I love. If my language or imagination feels stuck, I like to reread Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” or Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Sometimes, if I’m struggling with my iambs, I’ll recite the closing moment of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “to find, to seek, to strive, and not to yield.” That usually does the trick.

5. 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.

When I’m writing, the room needs to be silent, or I can’t think. To have a productive writing day, I need a cup of black tea, my favorite blanket on my lap, and perhaps an occasional cookie or two.

7. 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?

Many of my friends are poets. Writing is such an odd bird of a profession that it’s just a relief to talk with other people who speak the same language.

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

I have a Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier who starts chewing the apartment to shreds if he doesn’t have four walks a day.

9. 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?

I don’t believe in writer’s block. I also don’t believe in inspiration. I follow the poet William Stafford’s example and write every day. Inspiration is simply another way of speaking about those times when the long hours at the computer seem a little shorter; inspiration is muscle memory, not the Muse descending.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

A. I don’t have a desk yet, because I really want to buy the George Nelson swag leg desk, which was first produced in 1958; it’s made of walnut and chrome has cubbyholes in red, orange, blue, and yellow laminate. Since I can’t afford this piece of furniture, I sit in the living room with my laptop and put my feet up on my coffee table (which also happens to have been designed by George Nelson). I’ve done some pretty good writing in this spot. So, maybe I don’t need the desk after all.

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

I always try to divide my time between two projects, so that I won’t become bored with my own ideas. I’m working on a new poetry collection, Red Army Red, which uses received forms to explore the fascist rhetoric of my Eastern Bloc childhood. I’m also writing a book of lyrical essays about the experience of being a military wife. A Thousand Penelopes is the prose counterpart to my poetry collection, Stateside, which will be published by Northwestern University Press in the spring of 2010.

This poem by Jehanne Dubrow will appear in the spring 2009 issue of 32 Poems. Order a subscription and get a free issue!

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