Describe your writing process. Where does a poem begin for you? How do you know when it's done?
My writing process differs from poem to poem. I like to write ekphrasis poetry, poetic responses to art, film, theater, or literature. For example the poem “Nightlife (or The River Wife)” in my forthcoming book, Sprung, responds to the novel The River Wife by Jonis Agee. When I began the poem, I thought it would be focused on the novel, but through the writing and revision process I came to see what it wanted to be. When you read a good book, the outside world disappears—what you’re sitting on, what you’re wearing, the noises outside or inside the house, and the weather. When you pause your reading, suddenly the world comes back, but is haunted by the world inside the book. Momentarily, these two worlds are layered together, intertwined. You think--How is the heroine going to escape the flood being trapped in the tree?--while you’re walking to the closet to get another blanket, given the blizzard. You think-- Will the water rise over the tree tops? Will she be able to hang on?--as you settle yourself back down onto the couch. You think--Will someone come to her rescue?—as you glance to the window wondering how hard it’s snowing now, but you can’t see. You think--Will she swim to another tree to rescue herself?--as you study the window, now entirely frosted over. Thus, the poem “Nightlife (or The River Wife)” attends to those between moments when you’re neither fully in your world nor the world of your book, but hover ghostlike in the ether.
Who has influenced your work? What inspires you to write?
I’ve written many ekphrasis poems because I’ve felt inspired. Every semester I take my creative writing students to the art museum and ask them to write a poem about a painting, a sculpture, an instillation, or a photograph. I always write with my students, and sometimes I get great poems from this writing activity. For example, there’s a poem in my chapbook My Imaginary that responds to a sculpture. On several trips to the museum I had studied the piece, unsure why I felt drawn to it, but had passed it by to write about another. Then on one such field trip I decided, yes, I do have something I have something to write. “Another Princess X” responds to Princess X, a marble sculptureby Constantin Brancusi displayed at the Sheldon Art Museum in Nebraska. The original artwork appeared in the Salon des Indépendents of Paris in 1920. Brancusi’s inspiration for Princess X was an imaginary person, however a scandal followed its appearance in the Salon that culminated in police intervention and the removal of the phallic sculpture.
My chapbook, Branding Girls, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, is almost entirely ekphrasis poetry, responding to pieces by Melanie Pullen, Lauren Greenfield, Miwa Yanagi, and Camille Solyagua. For years I was an editor and writer for the feminist ‘zine Empowerment for Women. The magazine is currently on hiatus after ten years. I wrote dozens and dozens of reviews on books and music. I discovered the above mentioned American and international artists and wrote reviews of their books. There was something about their art that disturbed me, and though their books sat on my shelf, I would find myself opening them and paging through one striking image after another. Eventually, I started writing poems in response to the images. Some things stay with you, haunt you, and for me, those things often make it into poems.
Why poetry and not prose? Or do you write both?
I was accepted into my PhD program writing both prose and poetry, something I continued to do throughout. However, I made a conscious decision to select one to focus on for my comprehensive exams and the dissertation because I wanted to learn one craft well. My creative dissertation, two poems of which you’ve published here in Floorboard Review, is a collection of poetry, based on the life of the nineteenth century suffragist and lecturer, Matilda Fletcher (1842-1909), who is also my great-great-great-grandmother. The manuscript seeks to preserve a voice that might otherwise be lost from the historic record. Told from a variety of perspectives and based on extensive research, these poems use experimental and received forms as they seek to invoke the political, educational, and suffragist landscape of the nineteenth century. Matilda wrote poetry and prose as well. Her published books were all prose, but her lectures were often delivered in the form of a poem.
My poem “Affliction” is based on several pieces of information I found while researching Matilda. Matilda gave birth to only one child who lived, Alice M. Fletcher, or “Allie.” Allie died very young and is buried in the Woodland Cemetery in Des Moines, Iowa beside her parents. Much family lore notes the relocation of the Allie’s body from Council Bluffs, IA, where Matilda had lived in the late 1860s, to Des Moines, Iowa. Likely, this was done around the time of her first husband’s death in 1875.
My poem “Baggage” responds to the portable trunk plan, sketch, and specifications Matilda filed with the United State Patent Office on August 21, 1874. The patent was granted December 22, 1874 (patent number 158,056). Matilda’s first husband, John, was sick with tuberculosis that he had contracted while serving in the Civil War. Matilda was the breadwinner in the family as she toured the country on her lecture circuit.
Both poems deal with pain and loss. For me as a writer, I felt the only way to portray the emotional depths of Matilda’s character was to do so in the form of poems. I am working on essays about her work as well, but the poems came first.
How long have you been writing?
I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I think I wrote my first poem when I was seven, or at least that’s the first poem I remember writing. I wrote it for my mom who was pregnant with my kid sister. I remember only one line “I will defend” and I know it rhymed. At my elementary school a first grade girl had been kidnapped and the police had not been able to find her. Looking back know, I think I wanted to defend my mom and my sister from potential kidnappers. In the seventh grade, my best friend and I wrote a novel called The Etress. I still have a few handwritten pages of it and the sketches I did of the protagonist. Once you get the writing bug, there is only one cure: writing.
For you, what's the most important part of a poem?
I think that is something that changes. I used to think a lot of about the endings of poems. Where do you end? How do you end? If the poem is in form, how does the form move toward the end? I took a poetry and creative nonfiction workshop with Ted Kooser. Every week during the half-hour tutorials I would bring in four or five poems or an essay to show him. Several times he would point to a line or a stanza in my poem and say, I think your poem ends there, suggesting to chop off half the poem or several stanzas, or to reorder the poem.What his suggestion made me ponder is the movement toward the end. What do you do as a poet to get to the end of the poem? What are the steps? Where are the turns? What is the poem turning towards? This thinking helped me re-see my own poems. For example, my poem “Las Vegas Brand” in Branding Girls was a poem I was able to re-see after I had set it aside in a drawer for months and months. In revising it, I found the last lines were actually buried in the middle of the poem. I rewrote and reorganized all the lines of the poem to get toward that ending.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a good deal about beginnings, “the hook” that pulls the reader into the poem. I haven’t come to a conclusion yet, just looking, thinking, wondering.
Have you encountered resources or books on the craft of writing poems that have been especially valuable to you?
I love teaching and reading the wonderful book The Poet’s Companion, edited by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux.
Besides writing, what other interests do you pursue?
Reading, gardening, and traveling are interests I pursue; sometimes these interests even make it into poems. In my chapbook Ghost Girl the poem “Ghost Girl Wonders if she’s Always had Bad Eyes” is a meditation on vision, but also on how when we travel we remember to see the world around us. In the poem Ghost Girl flies to Florida to walk the white sands, tours a city garden of roses, and visits an art museum with an exhibit on artistic responds to Hurricane Katrina. Of course, I had gone to all those places and the places became a set or scene in the poem to consider the looking outward from the self to the strange, wonderful, and sometimes, eerie world.
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