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 was a chapbook, Lapsus Linguae, the first in a series of chapbooks published in the 1990s by Situations Press, edited by Kimberly Lyons and Joe Elliot. It was such a thrill to see my poems in chapbook form, and I’m still very fond of how a chapbook can hold longer poems or a series of related poems that are not "book" length. Lapsus Linguae also has a heavy letterpressed cover of textured paper—another aspect of the chapbook, that you can bring a visual or sculptural heft to it. Happily, Lapsus Linguae is available again online, thanks to the wonderful Blue Bag Press.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I tried writing a short story once and quickly realized that creating characters or working out a plot line were not for me. My parents are both visual artists, and so I appreciate how poetry is more related to other arts, like painting and music, that can sit free of linearity, and how I can experiment in so many ways with poetry. I love its potency too, and the concentration of it. I love the poetic line and how a line may unfurl along the page toward either an enjambment, or a stop, or fragment, or divert into another unexpected direction. That said, I made my living for a long time as a writer, editor, and copy editor—I worked for various publications, weekly neighborhood newspapers, niche enthusiast and lifestyle magazines, art journals, medical writing… It was a totally different writing process, extremely hardheaded and linear with of course lots of external constraints, but I enjoyed putting articles together, deciding which quotes to use from an interview, when to insert a data point, what the lede should be, etc., and I sort of miss that tactile sense of organizing information in the most direct and coherent way possible to connect with various audiences (especially in medical writing) and provide them very immediately with resources.
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?
Most of my projects take years, from initial idea onward. I’m a heavy reviser (or self-cannibalizer) and will revise right up to when someone else takes the work away from me. I keep journals with a lot of notes—notes while reading, or seeing art, or just interesting words or word combinations—so I’ll return to those journals often. They are sort of my seedbed. Every once in a great while, due to an inexplicable confluence of unknowable factors, I’ll be struck by lightning and a poem will emerge immediately from the sizzle. But otherwise, I've got a zillion drafts.
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 mostly have a concept, or even a title—usually several going simultaneously. The concept will slowly let itself be known to me—in that I keep thinking about it and turning it over in my mind, until a potential structure of poems start to emerge. I really love titles, and have lists of them, and they are sort of concepts too, like The Light Factory, A Winter Triangle, No Trees, Circles for Wheelmakers. I'll often write toward and from those title/concepts. Or I'll group discrete poems that seem to belong to that greater concept.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Edwin Torres once advised me to read as though I loved my own work, and I think I am finally arriving to that, feeling love for my poems and the words in them, or at least savoring and allowing space to the words in their order. And feeling love for the audience, whose live presence I value in these days of electric isolation. I practice a lot before a reading and that is part of the revision process, as I'll hear (or hopefully hear) what's clunky, etc. But I'm not a "performer"--I have issues with engaging in spectacle, increasing the noise, entertainment--I don't want to be an actor or producer.
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?
I'm associated with ecopoetics, and a continual concern in my writing is exploring the relations between internal human and "external"--even in finding new language or subverting old language or modifying present language to better hold the complexities of where our selves intersect that which is around us, and also change--how to change the destruction that our systematic existences is causing to our greater environment and fellow species. I find the language around "nature" so deficient and unwieldy--even the word "nature" itself is a loaded term, to the point it is repellent. Stepping outside English (this is where translation is helpful) helps me understand that there can be different ways of wording how we be within what we be in so that we're not so extractive and exploitative of us/all around/our continuum of self to world. I also want to protect words from misuse or cliché--for instance, the words "resiliency" or "sustainability" have been deliberately twisted away from their original meanings into really sneaky linguistic "cover" for various commercial/industrial extractions. ("Eco-friendly" is another one to beware of.) I'm dismayed to see very recently a few literary journals joking forbid poetry about "trees" or "ecopoetics"--it's like somehow the overwhelmingly topdown corporate/political disdain of and active disrespect for our environment is affecting even our little poetry circles. I still believe in the power of really intense odes to trees in their symbiotic relationships with a vast network of underground fungi and how their roots tangle with each other in what a few very alert and clear-eyed scientists are discovering is a mindblowing structure of communication and community that supports both very old and very young trees in a fierce network (even as they are regularly cut down and replanted in sterile formations that don't allow for root tangles, and they have absolutely no legal standing or human-codified worth/value in development projects, urban planning or land use) and one we might do well to emulate as a necessary alternative to capitalism! So there! To the trees! I am not tired of nature or poetry to/of/around it/us, especially as we are nature (which we say often, but apparently not often enough) and there are so many poems to be written "under that poem," as Lucille Clifton says in her poem, "surely i am able to write poems," pointing to all the horrors behind the false American pretty picture of "wilderness."
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?
I’m not sure I can generalize what the societal role of a writer really is, but I do see my own role as a questioner and maybe, like Thoreau implies, a drag on the wheel of progress (which is actually not a quote of his, but seems like it should be one). Writing poetry runs opposite to the producer/consumer cycle. Poetry is free and generous, and very portable. I also believe in writing lightly upon the earth—I don’t want to “tell” or direct or be didactic, I want to subvert, undermine, question, poke, point out, notice. I really want to notice. Poetry is silence’s musician, to paraphrase Mallarmé. I truly believe in poetry (art and music and dance too) as essential spaces of thinking, understanding, adjusting, being, imagining. As the societal circle of what's "acceptable" tightens, I see the poet coming into focus--right now, I feel even writing these words right now to you is a form of resistance.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
What’s an outside editor? (Kidding, but.) I give my work to a couple of trusted poet friends to eyeball, but otherwise, my poetry has been pretty much published as is. As a proofreader, I do try to present my work as cleanly as possible--and each comma should be in the space I meant it to be in. Hopefully.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Speaking of commas, I studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College and our class read through Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" together. He directed us to take a breath at every single mark of punctuation in the poem--light for commas, deeper for periods and colons, and deep draughts for exclamation points! He said it would be “intoxicating,” and we might feel dizzy. So I learned that punctuation in a poem is to mark breath (and I did feel dizzy). I had been pausing, awkwardly, at the ends of lines when giving readings, and it helped me tune into the importance of punctuation, pauses, breaths and the potential of caesuras. Ginsberg also pointed out a natural 13-syllable length to my lines, which alerted me to syllabics, and inspired me to start experimenting with them, including writing alexandrines in English (a selection was published by Tent Editions as Rays of the Shadow). But I have so many "bests," and one of them was taking a workshop with John Yau in the 1990s. He would assign us the most impossible challenges--like sestinas with predetermined end words. So many people dropped out; there were five of us left by the end. He helped me learn that poetry is a wild challenge! And fun. We laughed so much, and I even met my husband thanks to the workshop. But I love experiments and constraints, and learned not to be afraid of them--to pay attention to form always. Form is the poet's secret expertise.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
Translation is the most adjacent to poetry—I learn new words, new ways to look at old words, to understand how grammar works in a line, step back and into sound, how to carry experimentation and fragmentation from one language to another, how a constraint in one language can help shape a poem in another. I enjoy writing essays, but it’s a different part of my brain—more an observer or interpreter who steps back to look at or refine (or invent) what I’m thinking about in terms of poetry. Writing essays on poets or poetics helps me think through what I'm doing and why I'm doing it--to be an ornithologist for a minute. Essays are also a great way to engage really deeply with another poet's work.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t have a "typical" day so much—I work three days a week, and the other two are often filled up with life logistics stuff, but often in the late afternoon before I start dinner I’ll take a break, read some poetry, write some ideas down, get inspired, go back to the computer. Or if I wake up early, I’ll write. I try to write in life's spaces--on trips, breaks, alone times. At this point, I'm always writing one way or another, even if it's just thinking about a project while washing dishes or whatever.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Reading other poets’ work or nonfiction science/art books or looking at art helps give me new ideas. I’ve also learned to be patient—so often a new structure will start to come together when it’s ready, but maybe not when I'm ready. It’s a lovely moment to write when we're both ready.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Oil paint, wood, apples, lavender are all grounding scents for me.
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 of them--all very important. I see art, read science books, listen to music, hike and bird. I'm currently very interested in Ellsworth Kelly and how he worked with abstraction directly from natural forms. Mondrian's early landscapes are also incredible--again that movement from nature to abstraction. I just visited the reopened Studio Museum of Harlem and loved seeing so many previously neglected artists set in context and continuum, like William T. Williams, who brought abstraction into urban settings in the 1970s with the Smokehouse Collective. Agnes Martin and Lenore Tawney are two more artists I'll drop everything to see. Nature in the city is a big influence: how humans interact with nature is so surprising, bizarre, frustrating, horrific, but it's the truth too. I’m a devoted urban birder, and my happy place is an hour or two staring at some neglected patch of weeds with a bunch of sparrows in it while people play music and walk their dogs and talk around me. Also staring at water, being near water, absorbing all that infinite complexity of waves. I live next to the East River and need to visit it every day.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I feel connected to an enormous national and global web of poets with whom I correspond, even if I’ve never met them in person. It's amazing, during terrible times, this intense poetry community. In many ways, I feel I always have a place to stay, a meal to share and ideas (or books) to exchange. Specific writers to whom I offer my work and/or who give so much to me include Brenda Coultas, Tonya Foster, Will Alexander, Anselm Berrigan, John Yau, Anne Waldman, Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Jennifer Firestone, Rachel Levitsky, Edwin Torres, E.J. McAdams, Kostas Anagnopoulos, Lee Ann Brown, Peter Gizzi, Hoa Nguyen, Daniel Bouchard, Kay Prevallet, many others. People I've never or rarely met, but whose work I love: Norma Cole, Michael Palmer, Ed Roberson. Writers who have passed, but I think of them as community: Bernadette Mayer, Tina Darragh, Lyn Hejinian, Alice Notley, James Schuyler, Lucille Clifton, John Clare, the writers of the Wen Xuan, Tu Fu. French writers: Michèle Métail, Olivier Brossard, Mallarmé, Apollinaire. John Ashbery is perhaps my perennial and primal maître de poesie. (This is an incomplete list!)
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would love to swim around Manhattan, or at least swim the stretch of the East River between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I was early an ecological activist—I canvassed for NYPIRG at 16 (my first real job) and interned with them for my senior year at high school, so I learned a lot about activism and ecology, but I didn't quite realize how "new" ecology was as an actual career field. I applied to colleges intending to somehow study ecology, but hardly any college had majors in it (yet). So I went to college as a geology major, which, as soon as I found out I had to take math, I ditched. And then, I discovered poetry.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The fact that I became a poet is still somewhat of a mystery to my family, my friends and myself. My best friend from high school still laughs about what a terrible writer I was--I'd literally finish writing my grammar- and punctuation-free term papers as the teacher called on me to hand them in. However, I had a poetry teacher in college who was a poet himself and made it possible to think of being one too. Our aesthetics were very different, but he gave us newly published books by living poets to read and took us to readings, which made poetry feel immediate. And he helped me work on my grammar, to be serious about language. I don't remember ever making a conscious choice to "be" a poet. All of a sudden I was one, and I've continued to be one since.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Undrowning, which is a lesson in acknowledging the full bitter horrors of the past (and present) while offering incredible, generous love outward to the reader and to the natural world. As for movies, I loved "Sinners." Still unpacking so much of it in my mind.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I am thinking lately that I have way too many projects and ideas that maybe need to come together at some point. So. I'm working on poems called "Circles for Wheelmakers," that I think of somewhat as offerings outwards to the poets. The title comes from Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's utopian design for a saltworks, La Saline Royale, in which each building reflects the labor of the occupants (the sex workers' building is as you might guess). I visited the saltworks in France a few years ago, and it's remote, but as Orkney Island residents say, "Remote from what?" Half of it was built, with the other half devoted to various ecological experiments, and I got so much poetic material from the experience, part of which was recently published by Insurance Editions as The Light Factory, a collaboration with my mother, the painter Suzan Frecon.
I also have a series on the various iterations of the color blue, and grief, and loss--I don't want to say too much about it yet because to paraphrase it makes it sound trite, and I want to get deeper into it first and figure out what structure is going to hold it (them) eventually. A major challenge of poetry is to enter something thought of as "done," and to find a new approach. Like Stein with the rose.
During Covid, I started a series of what I'm calling spiral sonnets. I'd begin a sonnet, and then introduce a violent volta--a hand-drawn spiral into the 7th line--to see where that intervention would push the sonnet. I liked detaching the beginning from the end physically, and with such a direct push of the hand. Now that we're back in what feels a tightening spiral, in which our beginnings are being forced around to look at our end, I'd like to return to those sonnets.
I'm working on a translation from French of Oliver Brossard's first book, Let, part of which is in a complicated constraint based on Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath. It's a great way to get deeply into Brossard's work and also Ashbery's.
I also have a project on simmer--it's a big project, written during the destruction of my local park for a "resiliency" flood control project. I wrote so much of it in total anger and disillusionment that it's just sort of sitting there. I'm not ready to revise it, but I think about it all the time. It hasn't found its title yet--it started as East River Park, then changed to No Trees, and now I'm thinking Intentional Beauty (a term used in park design and urban planning).
During a residency this summer--my first in 20 years--I started a long, thin poem coming out of an achy body (there's something wrong with my foot, and now my hip...) walking and lying on hard glacial boulders by the ocean, and what voice is used to convey that--again, the self existing within a space, and how the self conveys--or exits itself to bring itself to others, maybe. Right now it's titled Without Charisma, which doesn't quite fit, but it might as it evolves. Anyway, that's the newest baby, and it's kind of different, so we'll see where it goes, other than into yet another drawer.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
