12 or 20 (second series) questions with Martha Ronk

Martha Ronk has had intersecting careers as a professor of Renaissance Literature and as a poet. She received her PhD from Yale University and has written numerous articles on Shakespeare’s plays, focusing on the interplay of the verbal and visual—a topic in her poetry as well. Teaching classes on 17^th century literature and on modern and contemporary poetry revived her practice of writing poems leading to poetry workshops at Bennington College. She has taught at Tufts University, Immaculate Heart College, Otis College of Art and Design, and for most of her career at Occidental College in Los Angeles where for many years she taught creative writing and coordinated the campus-wide Creative Writing Program.

Ronk has published eleven books of poetry, most recently with Omnidawn Press: CLAY bodies + matter 2025, The Place One Is 2022, Silences 2019, Ocular Proof 2016 on photographs, and Transfer of Qualities 2013 (the title a quotation from Henry James), long-listed for the National Book Award. Also in 2022 Parlor Press issued A Myth of Ariadne. Her book, Partially Kept, published with Nightboat Books, is in dialogue with Sir Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus; Vertigo, a National Poetry Series selection with Coffee House Press pays homage to W.G. Sebald, and why/why not, UC Press, plays off to be or not to be and is indebted to the play, Hamlet.  In a landscape of having to repeat, influenced by Freud’s essay on “Screen Memory,” won the PEN USA best poetry book of 2005.

Often in dialogue with other authors, Ronk sees her work taking shape in the spaces between various forms, vocabularies, and genres, each volume operating as a coherent whole rather than a series of individual poems.  Besides the profound influences of other authors, Ronk has also focused her poems on paintings, photographs, ceramics, and photograms, and many of her books include ekphrastic poems. Her collection of short stories, Glass Grapes and other stories, utilizes a variety of obsessive, unreliable narrators; and her book on food, Displeasures of the Table—semi-autobiographical, satiric, appreciative of all cooks—recommends reading over eating.

She has received a NEA award, had residencies at MacDowell Colony and Djerassi. She received the Sterling Award for scholarly excellence at Occidental College. Ronk has had readings at numerous bookstores and other venues, was a visiting writer at the University of Montana and at George Mason University. She was an editor of poetry books published by Littoral Press, and has had work included in eight anthologies, most recently North American Women Poets of the 21^st Century, Wesleyan 2021.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I wrote CLAY bodies+matter when I returned to the potter's wheel after a long academic career at Occidental College. It is the practice of making pots on the wheel that is the change in my life. The Clay book is different since it focuses on a specific practice, on the merging of hands and clay, on the emptiness inside a bowl, and on another form of practicing as writing poetry is a practice. I found myself working at both, revising in both arenas, doing research, and thinking about the ways in which they reflect one another. Clay is far messier. I so much enjoyed reading about Japanese practices, their long tradition in clay.

2 -  How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I taught 16th and 17th century poetry, wrote a dissertation on Milton, taught Shakespeare. I love John Donne. I was always drawn to poetry even as a child. I wrote one book of short fiction, Glass Grapes, because I wanted to create an obsessive narrator. I am not sure why this seemed to me to be fiction, but it did. I also find that poetry, for me, has to wrestle more with my interest in the visual. Although many poets don't like to use imagery, I do; I also like to write about photography and paintings: ekphrastic poems 

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?
It has depended on the particular project. Some come quickly or in tandem with an experience. Right now I am writing poems that seem distinct from one another,, but it is early days. A book usually takes 4 years and I mean for each project to be a unified book.

4 - Where does a poem  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 write drafts and individual poems until I have a fairly firm sense of what "book" I am working on; most of my books have been in dialogue with other authors: W.G. Sebalf, Henry James, Shakespeare's Hamlet, or specific places. I like having a partner, another to influence my narrow views.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? 
As I've gotten older I've been less and less interested and able to travel to give readings. I always enjoyed them, but recently not so much.I always liked listening to the others I was reading with. I'm reading for Omnidawn on Zoom on July 13 with others published in the fall. 

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?
It seems to me that many recent books concern gender, immigration, grief & war, and displacements of various sorts. There are so many gifted young writers from other countries. It is important for poetry to address these issues. I have written an unpublished manuscript on climate change; I will continue to write more about trees, birds, drought, and the environment. (A few poems to be published by The Colorado Review.) As a past teacher, I find myself interested in my relationship to past authors. I am interested in fragility (bodies, clay pots, cultures), in poetry that manages to include conceptual as well as linguistic work: that is, work that asks for deep engagement and thinking. Work that I want to re-read.

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?  
See #6 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I wish I had an editor. I do have a poetry group that meets every few weeks and I get good critical readings from the other poets. It helps enormously to have other poets respond to one's work before it goes public.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"To be a good poet you have to have a good seat." That is, show up. Practice. Show up again. Etc.  It is also good to wait some time to review one’s work.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal? 
As an academic I wrote academic articles on Shakespeare's plays; I also got up early to write poetry before leaving to take my son to school and me to class. I like that both require precision, research, reading, revision etc. I do less academic work now.

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 write something most days; I prefer early morning. Other poets often provide inspiration. Also form itself can inspire: choosing to write prose poems or epigrams or dialogues or long poems.  Recently, I found myself inspired by memories of paintings , memories of people I've lost track of or lost.  I also like walking: sometimes, if I’m lucky, a word or stairway or song will fall out as I’m walking: also there are all the things one sees: clouds, trash, a window ledge, leaf.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume? 
none.  I watched a child put on heavy make-up to be a cat.

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? 
Yes, paintings and especially black and white photographs: I wrote an entire book on photographs: “Ocular Proof.” My first husband was a photographer. I now look at pictures by great potters; I love the paintings of Giorgio Morandi. I like photographs of reflections in water, the idea of correspondences. New to CA I wrote a book about the desert (and HIV): “Desert Geometries,” and another called “State of Mind.” The paintings of Ariadne by De Chirico influenced my book on A Myth of Ariadne from Parlor Press: focused on the vulnerability of women, women’s bodies.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
W.G. Sebald. Edmund De Waal. most recently. Many poets. The Autobiography of Red.  Shakespeare most especially because his plays were central to my teaching for so long. I was moved by the writer Claire Keegan’s new novels.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? 
I wish I had traveled more. Scenes fill up the brain: I went to Sicily most recently and keep seeing temples in my mind’s eye. And mosaics. And the view to Africa.

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 think that moving from the east coast to LA had a profound effect on me as I found it strange, “familiar/unfamiliar’ as I’ve written in The Place One Is.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I couldn’t seem to help it. I think I needed to say things I believed I couldn’t say in any other way. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
 I liked the films on tv: Wolf Hall, The Fall.  I listened on Audible to Little Dorrit and have come to appreciate Dickens and his skewering of the wealthy as I didn't in graduate school. I'll never tire of re-reading Hamlet.  

20 - What are you currently working on?  
I'm trying to write about "the specious present" (William James) and time. Trying the operative word. Failing. Etc. Don't all beginnings feel like tripping and falling and feeling as awkward as possible? I keep asking “what is a moment?”  How might I define it or live it or imagine the ends of my own time? Reading his words on time stick with me, pushed me to try to find other ways of expressing the way a moment contains both past and future as well.

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