1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book--done in a purist mode, tending to minimalism, a realist and a feminist-mythic and lyric mode --was written out of and inside of a generally Objectivist poetics that was at that moment becoming resurgent. The book was Wells (New York: Montemora, 1980). One of four books published as a “Supplement” to the periodical Montemora, edited by Eliot Weinberger, the journal was characterized as elegant, intent, sophisticated in its literaryness. The editor sought European, Latin American, and United States contributors. This “Supplement” enterprise published Gustaf Sobin, Mary Oppen’s poetry, a first work by Mark Kirschen, and myself. As a first book, it helped me declare I was a writer of poetry, come what may.
My most recent poetry book, Drafts, in two volumes (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2025) joins the modern and contemporary long poem with its ode-ic and serial works in 114/115 cantos. The long work was written between 1986 and 2012, and became an excessive and wide-ranging work of poetic scope, cultural and historical commentary within an ethical aesthetics. It has been my central poetic project from the moment it showed its potential and was variously published (in many periodicals, by Salt Publishing in England, and one set by Wesleyan another by Chax Press in the U.S, during the generally twenty-five years during which I wrote it, before I closed it in 2012. Book-length selections have been translated into French, Italian, and Russian; and individual works into Spanish, Portuguese , and German, with a book-length work expected in Spanish. Canto-length works from this long poem have been anthologized, often in collections including the words innovative, experimental, or conceptual in the titles. The project led me to having something like an Objectivist-Projectivist poetics, committed to working out the contradictions of those position. The Complete Drafts as an unusually compelling and varied work of summation, explores topics personal, historical, and ethical with a striking array of genres and tonal varieties. This poetry tries to manifest my well known interest in a gender-subtle attitude and a lucidity and commitment to social poetics.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
As I child, I was read to a good deal from both poetry and fiction. As an adolescent, I picked up one of Louis Untermeyer’s anthologies of modern poetry. Between A.A Milne and Wallace Stevens, I was hooked.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Well, from 1986, I had a particular writing project. Because individual Drafts are about small chapbook size, I will use those to answer that spirit of your question. Initial writing (of one work, one Draft) may come quickly, yet I am generally a slow writer, very committed to revision, but also to the heuristic process of “making,” following where the poem might lead me, while at the same time that I am both responding to it, and pushing and pulling it. The individual drafts of Drafts took a while to get their final shape—whether that shape was an emotional trajectory, a rhythm of understanding, a serial examination, or an arousal to awe. The sound of the works in Drafts varies, because I have multiple goals: such as reacting to events, collecting soundings in the news, pursuing an investigation, creating an experience. Many works of Drafts are like poetic-essays; many write to a horizon infused with my homage to and resistance to various modernisms. In a certain way these works as a whole take poetry is a mode of expressive research into cultures (and sometimes specific moments of histories).
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I have done both. Once I began my long poem in 1986 after I published my second book, called Tabula Rosa (Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press, 1987), shorter writing was incorporated into a given work of making one Draft. I did not habitually craft or work through the possible shape of a given insight into a shorter poem but let shorter materials fuse and connect into longer forays. Once any single Draft started, materials often coagulated or were written with that Draft in mind. I did use citations and current realities as part of what I found as material; I also have a commitment to the literature of the past as I want to resee it.
After the whole long poem was declared closed in 2012, subsequently I wrote several shorter books, some as collage work, but one project presented itself in several books together beginning in work published in 2015. This set of short books emerged one after another as if in chapters about my particular experiences and observations of the (now) twenty-first century, particularly uneasy ones in the changed, authoritarian United States. That six book group I now see under the rubric (title?) of Traces, with Days. This set of works are (in reverse chronological order) Daykeeping. Chicago: Selva Oscura, 2023; Poetic Realism. Buffalo: BlazeVOX, 2021; Late Work. NY: Black Square Editions, 2020; Around the Day in 80 Worlds. Buffalo: BlazeVOX, 2018; Days and Works. Boise: Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 2017; and Graphic Novella. West Lima, Wisconsin: Xexoxial Editions, 2015. (the last one a college and text work.) I am currently completing this set of works, with a work conceived of as another shorter book, called Blazes, in the mode of socio-aesthetic saturation in contemporary histories taking soundings in the sense of time that I have. .
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love giving readings, particularly of my longer poems, since they have a logic through the voice. The author’s presence does not hold the poems together, but they can be dramatized through my voice, with clear readings of the syntax as a certain’s poem’s rhythmic disclosure.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
One concern got articulated in the first essay in my second book of gender and poetics : Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.) I think the work of modernity is incomplete for many people (because of intolerance, compromised literacy, badly-adjudicated justice, uneven distribution, despoiling economies) and that literary writing now has a responsibility to point out that incomplete modernity (given some of its promises and even premises). Hence I say that with my poetry, I’m trying to begin real modernisms all over again. In the essay, I say I want to approach “power and hegemony” with (among others) the tools of a “feminism of critique,” that is, with critical insights, empathy, claims of equity, and resistance where necessary. With the critical vocabulary and its sources in multiple groups, I have felt that a “re-vision” and rectification of our global disasters would necessitate the multiple, forceful, and polyvocal invention of a new culture” –might we say an inclusive, lively, and fairer one. At the same time, I do not for myself desire a hectoring or tendentious voice, although well-deployed polemic can have great virtues. The poetry I write does not pretend “answers,” it wants to see and register the world we know and that we want to question. I am more interested in “it” (the world and its languages and situations) than I am in “I”myself alone as an single particular, expressing feelings and pasts without any context or sense of what histories formed the self (and selves) of my poems.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger
culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should
be?
Aside from my comments above, I
appreciate in many ways the implications of “a poetics of critique.” With that
analytic-poetic acumen, I’d want sincerity, a poetry of observed accuracy,
language-intelligence, and of necessity..
I also deeply admire Joan Retallack’s phrase and sense of purpose in
“the poethical wager.” I also do not think poetry need be solemn, but rather
witty and playful, filled with the joys and twists of languages and dictions, because
it is serious.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have learned a good deal from good suggestions and a critical eye from others on my work.Those would be most often from reader’s reports through editors of my prose. I have had almost no poetry editors, but I was lucky enough to have George Oppen’s intrasigent eye on my very early work.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
When I had postponed writing too many times. I would say to others,”don’t postpone. If you need to do a work now, do it now!! Things do not keep indefinitely, and you can lose their impetus.”
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
Nothing is”easy”; you are working in different zones of address. But I have definitely done both with pleasure. For ease of identification for others, I sometimes call my poems “poem-essays,” because of their tonal variety (heteroglossia), and topical change-ups (collage). A person might choose to write, or somehow be chosen by these genres. You put your all into either, but a slightly different mix of that “all.” Because I have done both, I’d also distinguish them from scholarly essays and books (which I have also written with serious interest ); this is both an intriguing question and a longer term query—more than I can comment on here. First off, a work of scholarship for me is research-based at some point, might involve pertinent close readings that are essential to a chapter’s argument, and, without pretending you are the only decent critic in the world , such a genre presents a serious and efficient argument, often but not crucially to a community of professionals of which you are part. That set of commitments has degrees of difference from both essay and poetry.
Both essays and poetry differ from this somewhat idealized model of scholarship in my field (poetry/literature). In both you have to be called in a different way to write either, often in both by a very compelled sense of listeners, a community into which you are talking, and to a self as writing voice that compells you to say just this. Risk is paramount. Compulsion and desire distinguish these modes. For scholarship, one has keen external standards that are mostly in play. For essays and poetry, there is a keen and irreducable sense of internal necessity that makes you stick to. with, and by a given work at a different level of loyalty to your vision of it. The degree of sheer drivenness and the deep need to work on the shape and tonalities of poems and essays are certainly part of the appeal for me.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one?
In my professional life, it was quite hard for me to compartmentalize. A writing routine has been what I could manage in the time available.That seems to be true even after retirement.
How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I wish I had a typical scheme I could give you. Days differ drastically throughout one’s life.
I was a professor in a university. My teaching schedule changed semester to semester. I graded student work as part of my job. I saw students, often accounting for their schedules. I prepared (or over-prepared) my classes (literature, creative writing women’s studies, “Western humanities”) and had original syllabi to draw up sometimes several time a year. I had profession responsibilities inside and outside the university (editorial, administrative).. Schematizing all this, plus being married and a mother—and a person, and a poet—I kind of wonder how everything did happen. My only answer is I didn’t watch TV.
I will say one thing, I used to revise Drafts on my commute by train. The half hour or forty minutes meant I would whip out a current poem and read it and listen to it and revise it during that private time in a public space.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Patience, doing something else, and giving the stalled work a week or a month off; and often reading something-- a poem in a different language than English, or a writer opposite from my mode, or a work reminding me of what I am trying .
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Of my home? Of the home I grew up in? Mine—spices I like to cook with; of my childhood home, maybe tea and buttered toast.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
All on your list—arts and sciences—(science and math ideas through NY Times science pages and general-audience books ) All , definitely, consistently, rigorously valued and pursued during all my active years (in concerts, museum and gallery attendance, some friends in those fields). I sometimes understand my experience making my long pom as creating a “sculptual” shaping. Big chunks of matter are made by me brought into, melded into one item to experience. I therefore value the different-from-literary insights of other forms and the shaping each accomplishes to reach their total, completed shapes. To answer this question, I would also include much foreign travel (much more than most people I know) and even the chance to experience living in places other than my actual citizenship for months at a time.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
George Oppen, Robin Blaser, Virginia Woolf, and many contemporaries as serious companions with true writing grit and sometimes with large-scale projects. Their names vary over lifetimes of reading and teaching.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Have had piano lessons or cello lesson early enough in my life so I could have played an instrument decently. Have the stamina to take a very big hike. You’ve cast the question as “what do you still want to do.” That’s not where I am temporally.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?
Medical doctor.
Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Since I have had a negligible income from my poetry, essays, reviews, readings and appearances, reader’s reports for presses, etc. . ., I always had to have an occupation in another profession. What i somehow choose was my a definite interest, and that is “what I did” (I didn’t “end up” doing it—I wanted to do it!) I picked a profession near to writer, incorporating writing (that is, being a literature professor), but it was a more regularly structured profession than only writing. Hence I could count on its income and benefits along with other institutional advantages, like good library access and some very intriguing.students and colleagues.I don’t think I could have survived the market as a high-end or free-lance journalist, or as an editor Plus, I thought that women should choose (if possible) to have an income they called their own, one that a person could actually live on, so tht marriage was a choice, not done for access to an income.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
That’s the mode my creativity took, and that path was more clearly available and valued than others to people who had an influence on me; writing also appealed to my own curiosity. I might also answer with Robert Creeley’s summary remark, “I’m driven to write poems.”
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Not sure I can formulate a response to this. I like lots of creative works for what they say, how they say it, and what they give me.
20 - What are you currently working on?)
The book called Blazes that I mentioned already. And f I am lucky, a book of essays in poetics and poetry called Difficult Bliss. Which is exactly what this literary and scholarly career has been.
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