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 remember getting
the call from Janet Holmes in the summer of 2006 telling me Ahsahta Press
wanted to publish Realm Sixty-four. After we said goodbye, I threw up in
the bushes. So the story about how my first book changed my life begins with
how the acceptance of my first book for publication meant I had a new home, one
with press-mates who regularly wow me and a publisher who continues to support
me beyond that first book and allows me to have a sense of belonging as a poet,
who thus free me up to continue to follow language down the various paths it
leads me.
My new work is moving
away from sound as the guiding impulse (though sound will always be important
to my poems). The associative energy, however, feels the same—or at least a
continuation of my earlier poems.
2 - How did you come to poetry first,
as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
When I was pretty
young, I had to take speech therapy, and my speech therapist had me repeat
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lines to her because his words are so
mouth-dense/sound-rich and help a young tongue learn some flexibility and
movement. In some very real ways, I consider Hopkins’ poems my first words. I
have the first six lines of part 8 of “Wreck of the Deutschland” tattooed on my
back, so his words continue to be bound up with my sense of embodiment, with my
being-in-language. Poetry is the genre that feels most bound up in the
foundational ways I see and say the world.
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 depends on the
day—month—year—decade—impulse—sense of fidelity. One of the writing projects
I’m most excited to start writing felt for a while like a corrupted seed, but
now there’s a hint of something finally emerging, and the poems will benefit
from it—because I’m older, because I have had more encounters with loss and a
better understanding of commitment, which are two of the project’s primary
investments.
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?
A poem usually begins
for me with a word or a phrase. The repetition of three letters—“ach”—in
“stomachache,” for example. As far as the second question goes, I’ve done it
both ways: my two most recent books, Bright & Hurtless and My My,
began as individual poems that I ultimately realized were den-mates and then a
book of poems. It was a good shift for me: to be writing without expectation,
to just be writing—I’m happy (and not too surprised) that a shared sensibility
emerged among the poems I was working on in these various segments of time.
5 - Are public readings part of or
counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing
readings?
Readings feel more
neutral than “part of or counter to [my] creative process.” I have begun to
enjoy readings again, though I definitely went through a period when readings
depressed me. A lot of the life of my writing is on the page—is visual—and this
aspect of the poems is hard to translate into the reading of them.
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 am interested in
form as performance—form as something the text does rather than something
content is contained within. I remain interested in the unconscious of the
text: the “more” that it says, the moments when mishearing and misreading create
and complicate meanings and energies. I guess my primary questions always are:
what does a word do? What does a word hold? What happens when a word glances at
another word? What happens when it stares?
7 – What do you see the current role of
the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think
the role of the writer should be?
I think one role of the writer is to provide sites for new habits of
attention to emerge and/or to model different ways of seeing, noticing, making
visible. In a fast-paced world, I think poetry—with its recursive bent—can be
particularly useful in reminding us the value of slowing down, dwelling,
circling, revisiting.
8 - Do you find the process of working
with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve had only
positive experiences working with editors. I was lucky enough to have an
amazing MFA cohort at the University of Arizona who prepared me for hearing
other people’s feedback and choosing when and when not to integrate certain
insights into a revision. I’ve been lucky to have editors who trust me and whom
I trust.
9 - What is the best piece of advice
you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t hold grudges.
10 - How easy has it been for you to
move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Initially, it was a
struggle. When I entered the PhD program in Literature & Creative Writing
at the University of Cincinnati, I went into one of my professor’s offices at
the end of the first semester and told him the graduate committee must have
admitted me by mistake because I was an academic fraud. Luckily, he gave me a
well-meaning and well-timed eye roll, told me to go do a rhetorical analysis of
x, y, and z journals, then to go write my paper. I did, and then I wrote
another one and another one, and eventually I started feeling a little more
agile in my critical prose. It was a proud moment for me to win UC’s critical
essay prize my final year in the PhD program and another proud moment when my piece on footnotes and endnotes as form in Jenny Boully’s The Body and [onelove affair]* got picked up by Textual Practice. I find writing
critical prose quite energizing. I have a monograph in mind and now that I have
research support at the University of Louisville, I hope to complete it.
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’m a professor, so
my writing schedule depends on my teaching schedule. After being on the job
market for six years, I’m very lucky to now have a tenure-track job and a 2/2
load (compared to my previous contingent status and 5/5 load)—research and
writing are part of my paid workload, which makes an incredible difference (in
all the ways). When I’m on a MWF, I make sure to set aside the first several
hours of the day on TR for my own writing. If I’m on a TR, then I set aside the
first several hours of MWF for my own writing. Some afternoons, I write in the
afternoon for 2-3 hours with one of my colleagues: it’s nice to have that kind
of accountability, knowing someone else is expecting you to be writing. I don’t
schedule writing for the weekends anymore, though I often find myself writing
then. I think it’s important to find space to simply take in the world—in that
way, the time I’m not writing is always already bound up to my writing time.
12 - When your writing gets stalled,
where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The letter, syllable,
or a crossword puzzle. I love making a good word chain to get my mind moving
and to start seeing and making connections that will trigger a line or series
of lines.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of
home?
My husband Perry’s
deodorant
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?
Oh, definitely. All
the above. I am very open to encounter.
15 - What other writers or writings are
important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Gerard Manley Hopkins
taught my mouth how to move. Also important to me: Susan Howe, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Gertrude Stein, Harryette Mullen, Jack Spicer, Anne Carson, Richard Jackson, C.D. Wright, Charles Dickens, Christine Hume. My writer friends, of
course, are important to my writing and my life outside of my work—I wish I
could visit Tucson more (Kristen Nelson, TC Tolbert, Annie Guthrie, Frankie Rollins, and Drew Krewer are still there) and time-travel to Tucson in
2003-2012; I wish I could teleport Merinda Simmons, Jillian Weise, and Megan
Martin to my house for coffee every morning. I’m very lucky to have great
creative writing colleagues, including Kiki Petrosino, Ian Stansel, PaulGriner, and Sarah Strickley, along with poetry scholar Alan Golding.
16 - What would you like to do that you
haven't yet done?
Go to Greece, which I
finally get to do in August. Write a nonfiction book. Make eggplant bacon. Get
my tires rotated and balanced. A whole range of consequential and
inconsequential things.
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 I would have
made a good surgeon.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to
doing something else?
I grew up in a
library family—my mom convinced us that checking out and reading books was just
about the most exciting thing you could do. Reading led me to writing.
19 - What was the last great book you
read? What was the last great film?
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m currently
experimenting with the alexandrine for a manuscript I’m calling Undertaken.
