The Best American Poetry

Mark Bibbins On Where Poems Start & Backing Away from the Stinky Dead Beast aka Confessional Narrative [by Martha Silano]

I'm drawn to Mark Bibbins' work because he is not a confessional poet, and also because linear narratives do not seem to be exceedingly important to him. He is, of course, not the first contemporary poet to move away from confessional narrative, but what stands out about Bibbins' work (at least for me) are three things: his attention to and aptitude with sound/rhyme, his use of word play, and the unexpected forms his poems take. Here the author answers questions about his new book, The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon 2009).

MS: You state in your 2009 BAP contributor note that “Concerning the Land to the South of Our Neighbors to the North” gained its foothold when the final line of the poem (“Connecticut! We’re sawing you in half.”) popped into your head.  Is it common for you to get first (or last) lines in your head, triggers that coalesce into poems? Or do poems come to you elsewise?

MB: For me a poem starts with a phrase or a sentence that arrives, usually without warning or preparation, then the rest grows around that. Some wind up as titles, others beginnings or endings; most change their minds and move around as it’s coming together.  I certainly wouldn’t have sat down to write a poem “about” America, as my level of ambition is pretty low. I prefer to let something besides that direct a poem toward or around its subject(s).

MS: Speaking of “Concerning the Land . . .,” it’s a wonderful poem on the first go, but, at least for me,  it only gets better with each re-reading. Can you share a bit about the making of this poem? Did the Necco wafers and New Jersey’s queer shoulder come quickly to you, or did it take several throws to get each state just right? Also, how conscious were you that each state’s stanza is gazelle-ishly distinct? Did anyone read a rough draft, and if so were there any suggestions for revision?

MB: A handful of states came during a train ride through the Nutmeg State, and I picked up again after returning home a few days later—it happened quickly, and the conceit really hustled it along. I like hearing of odd events and foods and landmarks that places are “known for.” It’s preposterous and sweet, sometimes creepy. Also arbitrary, which is why I felt entitled to fabricate, and why it didn’t always matter what information was attached to which state (New Jersey and Ginsberg being, as they so often are, exceptions).

Nobody saw a draft of it. The wonderful Danielle Pafunda had offered to consider something of mine for La Petite Zine, which she was coediting, and I’m grateful for her consideration. I usually don’t show poems to anyone until I feel I’ve finished writing and revising them, which isn’t to imply that I haven’t been given good advice in the past. Nor do I mean to separate the processes of writing and revision.

MS: The Dance of No Hard Feelings is a delightful read, mainly because of its striking use of language (“ice javelins our throats”), its word play (we fly [fly] / will fly / should fly /will have flown / are flying apart”), and its gritty/urban walking-around-on-a-golf-course feel. There’s so much fire and ice in this book—boiling seas and firey angels; snow and ice and freezing. Is the world going to end in fire or in ice?

MB: Right now I suspect it will end in paperwork. That, or water—abundance and/or lack thereof. But the earth won't be ending. It will be editing.


MS: In these poems you seem to continually resist and give into narrative, into a speaker with a past, present and future. What’s your relationship with narrative poetry? Is the confessional poem, or the I poem in general, an old, hairy, dead beast to back away from as quickly as possible?

MB: A quick look at my bookshelves reveals very little narrative or confessional poetry, assuming I understand what you mean by those terms—is “The Day Lady Died” narrative poetry? an I poem? I like it when poems surprise me, and a lot of what falls into the above categories doesn’t do that, mainly because of the style in which they’re executed, not their content. As old as this debate is, it seems the dead beast isn’t going anywhere; that doesn’t mean I want to hover over it, sniffing it and describing the stink.

MS: Explain your use of brackets.

MB: Phantom opportunities.

MS: I enjoyed “Forcefield”—it’s hard to write about breaking up, and you do it well here ([no succor / no syntax / no sleep]. I have to be honest, though: I don’t think I would have enjoyed an entire book of these space-ful, language-y-conscious type poems. A few good ones of this ilk, okay, I’m fine with that. And yet, you seem comfy wearing many different aesthetic hats. Incidentally, are you and Ashbery tight? Which poets have influenced you the most?

MB: I wouldn't want a whole book of those either—thanks? To me they seem less about breaking up than enacting or embodying a kind of brokenness. I have no idea who or what's influenced me the most; there are so many people and things, and I don’t like to rank them, but I enjoy Gertrude Stein and My Bloody Valentine a great deal (whenever I’m asked that question, I can’t help naming bands). John Ashbery’s writing has amazed me for many years, and I’m happy to call him a friend.

MS: How did LIT magazine come about? Do you enjoy that part of being a poet? Who reads the slush pile? Does being an editor hinder or help your own writing?

MS: We hatched it when I was a student at The New School; the faculty and administration were very supportive in getting it going. We drummed up work for the first two issues mostly by solicitation, and my tenure as poetry editor officially ended before there was much of a slush pile. Current graduate students and the alumni who serve as editors now read the submissions, and I remain safely “at large.” My editorial experiences have mostly been helpful, although I edited fiction reviews at a magazine for a couple of years, which wasn’t.  
 

MS: Finally, the $10,000 question: How did you go from being a kid in love with words (correct me if I’m wrong on that) to Best American Poet? What’s the recipe for best-ness?

MB: You’re certainly not wrong, although a lot of the time I still feel like a kid (not always a great thing). Not following recipes has informed both my successes and failures. Sorry if that’s a $10 answer. Do you need change?

Ed note:  Read another interview with Mark Bibbins here.  Find a schedule of his upcoming readings here.

Susan Blackwell Ramsey: Pearl One Knit Two Pickles & a Bear You Don’t Dare Ignore [Martha Silano]

Today’s interview is with 2009 BAP contributor Susan Blackwell Ramsey. Susan and I began emailing each other in 2001 when a friend suggested I needed to know her. Regretfully, I did not archive those initial exchanges, but I assume they must have been rather cursory and formal, lacking subject lines the likes of “AIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” or “Nononononononoo oooooooooo,” which soon became de rigeur. Yes, we must’ve initially been professional. Just-met composed. But looking back, I can’t recall a time when we weren’t firing off effusive and impassioned missives upwards of 5x a day. It was one of those Gemini Titan II rocket friendships; it just took off.

I finally met Ms. Ramsey in person at the 2009 BAP Release Bash in NYC this past September. In the weeks leading up to the visit, I began to worry she might not live up to her cyber-self, or even worse, that she’d find me jejune, sophomoric, or—most likely—an insufferable windbag. I am happy to report that the meeting went more than smoothly; Susan turned out to be every bit as passionate, funny, wise, and knowledge-crammed about poetry (and about a whole lot else, it turns out) as she was in her emails (and since she’s still writing me, I’m assuming I didn’t completely disappoint). My only complaint is that we had just three hours to stroll the European Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art together. But since I am still in the process of trying to track down every poem, book, painting, novel, memoir, DVD, and video clip she enthusiastically raved about in those three hours, perhaps it was enough to tide me over till we next meet.

By now it’s pretty obvious that I count myself as one of the lucky to not only know Susan’s work (her poems are put together like freaking DNA strands), but to have Susan as a friend, a first reader, and as someone who promises me if I ever come to Kalamazoo she will teach me how to knit (fat chance, as I cannot thread a needle, but I love her all the more for her willingness to believe she could).

And now, without further ado, the brilliant, funny, and enviably humble Ms. Susan Blackwell Ramsey:

MS: Share the journey from start to finish (or anywhere in between) of your BAP poem, "Pickled Heads: St. Petersburg"--number of drafts, comments/suggestions by others, number of magazines submitted to, major overhaul(s), etc. Was it a poem that came easily, or one that you struggled with?

SBR: I was reading a book on the evolution of natural history museums which mentioned that Peter the Great had the heads of his wife’s reputed lover and his own executed mistress preserved in “spirits of wine.” While morbid curiosity kept me digging for details, I kept remembering other equally peculiar stories of preserved bodies and body parts. Each story seemed bizarre, but there were so many of them that they began to fall into subcategories while I kept asking “Why?”

The story of its quest for publication warms my black little heart. After the usual rejections and revisions I entered it in a small local contest just to swell the ranks. The young man who called began by saying “You won’t believe this, but [the celebrity judge] gave you third place!” Um. I believe it, but apparently you … And in the end they decided not to publish it, though I was left to figure that out for myself when the staff’s congratulations kept arriving with expressions of sympathy. Out of sheer fury I washed its face, brushed its hair, packed it a lunch and sent it off to Prairie Schooner. I thought it made a very nice little morality tale for writers when they printed it – but when David Wagoner chose it for BAP ….

MS: If I'm to infer from "Pickled Heads" and several others I've read of yours ("Mt. Saint Helens, May 19, 1980"; “Gaueamus, Full Band Version,” ) you seem to enjoy making poems that allow you to draw on your ability to read voraciously and remember, to quote from your BAP contributor's note "only inessential information." Am I getting this correctly, or do you sometimes get an idea for a poem and then start in on the research?

SBR: I have a lint-roller for a brain. Only useless information sticks, so much of my writing has been an attempt to find protocols where this is an advantage. Dennis Schmidt talks about “double agenda” poems, David Kirby is more like the Flying Karamazov brothers, juggling a bowling ball, a potted philodendron, a pound of liver and a chain saw. Realizing that I could have fun braiding my enthusiasms through poems probably owes a lot to Kirby’s pinballing productions like “The House of Blue Light.” When what seem fascinating stories and facts start doing their Boolean dance in my head and I try to figure out why they seem connected and how to introduce them to one another. Right now I’ve got one about an art forger, a literary fraud and the man who produced fake spearheads that fooled the experts; I like it, but my best readers remain uncharmed, so it’s still on the drawing board. But research begets research – I’d heard one story about the premier of Brahms’s “Academic Festival Overture,” but the truth was much better, and changed “Gaudeamus” as it was being written.

Besieged, assailed, and stormed

  
Here's an excerpt from a recent live chat transcript between readers, writer Ligaya Mishan, and Paul Muldoon, poet and poetry editor for The New Yorker (and guest editor for BAP 2005):

QUESTION: ...Contrary to public opinion, good poetry seems to be constructed, rather than spontaneously created. This obviously takes a lot of time. Therefore, how would you suggest a serious student of poetry manage or even afford to have this time? Should he just Wallace Stevens it?

PAUL MULDOON: It’s certainly true that it takes more work than most people might consider. That’s largely because all the work goes into making the poem look as if no work whatsoever has gone into it. And reading, both of other poems and the poem that’s even now coming into the world, is vital. But it’s still not like getting ready to run a marathon in Kenya. The exercise analogy doesn’t quite work. No amount of physical practice or mental preparedness will ensure that one will be able to run the marathon of the poem.

QUESTION: How does one get started as a poet? Clearly, trying to get published in The New Yorker off the bat is a long shot.

PAUL MULDOON: One gets started by having a lot of nerve but a nerve tempered by nervousness. Hubris tempered by humility. The chances of getting published in The New Yorker are slim in the sense that we publish only a hundred poems a year. But the chances of being published here are nonetheless real if you manage to write a really stunning poem. Nobody ever knows when, or how, that might happen. Soon, I hope.

Here's to stamina and "soon" for anyone flummoxed by their own stubborn drafts.  Read the whole transcript here.

-emma trelles

This Just In: Jamie Katz Interviews David Lehman for Smithsonian

Lehman discusses A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters American Songs.  Read the complete interview here.

(Photo Irving Berlin singing at the dedication of the Los Angeles City Hall)

Greg Santos presents Todd Swift (Part 3 of 3)

Read parts 1 and 2 of this interview here and here.

Greg Santos: You are the poetry editor of Nthposition, an award-winning online magazine.  How has the internet affected your writing?

Todd Swift: The Internet – which can be very instrumental – is over-rated.  It’s good for exposing poets to each other, and building links and communities.  But, for every warm and fuzzy thing about it, there are the jerks who snipe and gripe, and just try and bring things down.  This is a wider problem with this generation.  There are few people willing to build platforms of celebration and community.  It’s almost always about an atomized negation.

    I feel that until the “inner circle” of poet-critics pays proper attention to the Internet, it will continue to be something of a ghetto. I do think that when this decade is studied, academics will read and reconsider sites like Nthposition (which is already archived in the British Library) but from my experience of academia, research tends to focus on a narrow few.

GS: You are an avid supporter and promoter of poetry, both online and in print. What is your hope for the future of the art?

TS: I hope poetry moves away from the commercial model, and that it becomes less celebrity-obsessed. Selfishly, I hope that I begin to get more recognition, even a prize – paradoxically, of course. I need some “cultural capital” to energize my batteries from continuing to support and encourage others. I have been down lately, seeing my New and Selected come out to very few reviews.

GS: How do you see the state of poetry today?

TS:  I feel poetry is more or less dominated by a few larger presses, a few larger prizes, and is less and less robust.  There is a lot of poetry, but I feel that 98% of poets and poetry will never get a fair shake, or a chance to reach beyond their small moment.  What’s lacking is a disinterested circle of critics, as for instance films have, who can discover indie projects and champion new visions, and cut through the hype. I feel that most of what is received as canonical now is made so simply from the prestige of publication by a large press. I feel that poets spend a lot of time debating about poetics, when they should be asking more questions about the means of production.

GS: What part does spirituality play in your poetry?

TS:   I converted to Anglicanism at the age of 18.  25 years later, I was at church on Good Friday in England the other day. But in between, there has been a lot of doubt and struggle with faith.  I resist atheism as too simple. I have enjoyed reading about other religions. However, Christian theology is very fascinating to me. Christ was an exemplary figure; then again, so is Obama.  Many of my poems explore the tension between the secular and divine perspectives. I try to play faith off of sexuality.  The body is not entirely explained by religion, and desire seems to exceed the needs of love. I believe in yearning towards a utopian horizon, where asking about the existence of God potentially brings her into being.

Greg Santos presents Todd Swift (Part 2 of 3)

Read Part 1 of this interview here.

Greg Santos: How have friendships, including those within the Montreal scene, been important to you in your literary career?

Todd Swift: I have often co-edited anthologies, and collaborated with friends on projects – Martin Penny, Thor Bishopric, Tom Walsh, Jason Camlot, etc.  Friendship is the unspoken grease of the poetry wheel – almost everything that gets done in poetry is because of love or friendship.  After all, who else do we write to and for?  I miss my friends, and have fewer over here [in London], where I tend to be more isolated.

GS: I’ve spoken to three other poets based in or from Montreal: Jason Camlot, Jon Paul Fiorentino, and David McGimpsey.  What do you have in common with each other?

TS: I think we are all children of A.M. Klein and Cohen – interested in humor, stylishness, joie de vivre, French culture, eroticism, play, and internationalism.  Montreal never felt small or limited. We were all part of a great tradition.  We still are.  I think Montreal poetry of the last 75 years is as impressive as that of New York, London, any city.  It just doesn’t get a fair press.  Ironically, even the Montreal Gazette has a provincial attitude to its own native sons.

GS: The Montréal poets I’m interviewing often incorporate popular culture into their poems.  In “Vocal Range”, you write that there are “Many mentions of popular figures, movies, and TV – / Getting overmuch of the world crammed into crawl / Spaces under text, sometimes on top of it – / How much hipness can any master muster, then use?”   Yet you often reference popular figures, popular culture, and films in your poems.  What is the difference between the “hipness” mentioned here and that of the poems that you write?

TS: That’s me being ironic – and debating with my own style, questioning it.  I was also thinking through how I relate to the work of poets like David Trinidad, Alex Porco, and of course, David McGimpsey.  I think there is a wide spectrum: on the one hand, dull poems by Andrew Motion about swallows in the evening, and then again poems by McGimpsey about, say, Bart Simpson.  Both seem to me to be equally artificial and legitimate positions, one based on Wordsworth, the other drawing on Ginsberg, and Ashbery.  The problem for me is: where does the poet locate himself or herself in the world, in relation to the media, but also, nature – even as mediated?  Poets from the romantic English Line exclude as much as they include, whereas the O’Hara school tends to bring everything into the poem.  That tension, between excess and austerity, is where poems occur.

GS: Do you prefer writing as yourself or from the point of view of a persona?

TS: I have always written in personae – in fact, many of my “lyric I” poems are enactments of speaking voices, or positions that are not my own, but ironic, or dramatic, explorations of style or psychology.  This is why I find it annoying when critics speak of “finding a voice”.  I have always been interested in a polyphonic approach.

GS: I’ve noticed that your poetry not only uses polyphony, but also creates a sort of “multimedia” effect.  You’ve even said that you see “poetry in terms of cinema”.

TS: I love film. Film and pop songs have shaped my work as much as literary texts have. Eisenstein saw cinematic montage as being poetic.  Vachel Lindsay was a poet who valued cinema early on.  So did Crane and Fearing.  As a screenwriter, I learned some tricks of the trade, and I suppose I have brought them to bear of my poetry, albeit subtly – in terms of editing, scene-setting, etc.  Poetry is not just linguistic, but imagistic. I was quite influenced by the Imagists. I often compose poems that have strong visual effects in them. That being said, I resist narrative per se. I see that as more a novelistic device (plot). I have an uneasy relationship to prose, as I think it is over-rated. Like Poe, I think poetry is the most exciting art form.

Greg Santos presents Todd Swift (Part 1 of 3)

Interview with Todd Swift [by Greg Santos]

"I think Montreal poetry of the last 75 years is as impressive as that of New York, London, any city,," says Canadian poet Todd Swift.  "It just doesn't get a fair press. Ironically, even the Montreal Gazette has a provincial attitude to its own native sons." Since Swift lives in London, England, and I shuttle between New York and New Haven, we conducted the interview by e-mail. Our internet correspondence was a fitting one considering Swift is an enthusiastic blogger and promoter of poetry through Nthposition, the award-winning web journal, where he is its poetry editor.-- GS

GS: You were born in Montreal and raised in the city of St. Lambert, Quebec.  Even though you currently live in London, England, do you consider yourself a Montreal poet?

TS: I consider myself an Anglo-Quebec poet, but more than that, a cosmopolitan poet.  I deeply regret the way that poetry reception gets shaped and controlled by national interests, often for marketing and other commercial reasons.  I see the English language as one wide field for play.

GS: You’ve also lived in Budapest, Hungary and Paris, France.  How does place inform your writing?

TS: Well, I have always felt displaced.  Being an Anglophone in Montreal was like being an American in Paris.  I grew up loving tales of the exotic and foreign – Maugham, even Orwell.  And of course Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  I always wanted to be an expatriate.  I found Canadian media and culture often smug and confining.  I longed to engage with the “wide world”.  So, places are always the somewhere I wanted to be – or where I want to be away from.

GS: Your newest collection of poetry, Seaway: New and Selected Poems, has an interesting cover photo of the St. Lawrence Seaway.  What is the significance of this photo and of the choice to title your collection Seaway?

TS:  My good friend, Etienne Gilfillan, is a London magazine designer who is also from St. Lambert.  When I mentioned the title, he researched and found this amazing retro picture.  It captures my sense of the Montreal Gothic – to coin a phrase – neo-romantic, retro, nostalgic, yet also ironic, even cool.  How Leonard Cohen dresses, for example.  The title was selected to place my work in a natural time and place that was also shaped by artifice – that is, the Seaway project is one of those massive manmade transformations that really captures the adventure of Canada –  Canada as a fusion of nature and construction.

       More to the point, as a kid, I’d see these ships go past, from what I imagined as Russia, and Peru – I lived by a sort of North American Panama Canal.  It fed into the dream of travel mentioned above.  I wanted to capture that in the title of my book – how my poetry is deeply grounded in childhood, local fantasy and wonderment, but is very adult and international, too.

GS: What are some of the differences between the various poetry scenes you’ve encountered in your travels?

TS: What strikes me about the American scene is how open it is, to difference and to others.  Yes, there are poetry wars, but I was always able to talk to various slam, or Language, or new formalist poets, with some sense of mutual respect.  In Europe, poetry is far more marginalized than in the English-speaking world – in France, poetry is really an elite cult.  What has shocked me about the UK is how much of a tight ship it is – it’s really controlled by about five or six more or less rigid and often arrogant “gate-keepers” who basically despise the experimental wing of modernism; then again, the avant-gardists in the UK are mostly humorless, and follow a strict Marxist line as laid down by Adorno (no pop culture). Postmodernism, in the UK, is a dirty word for most poets.  I miss the bonhomie of the Montreal scene.

Nin Andrews Interviews Denise Duhamel, Part 2

(ed: This is Part 2 of Nin Andrews' interview with Denise Duhamel. Read Part 1 here.)

5. 

Nin Andrews:
What was the first record you bought?   How has music or art affected your writing?

Denise Duhamel:
That is such a great question!  Embarrassing to answer, but here goes.  The first record I ever bought was by the Partridge Family.  My favorite song then was “I Think I Love You.” My mother had much better taste than I did, though, and I grew up grooving to Petula Clark.

6.   

Nin Andrews:
You teach a lot of poetry classes.  Is there something you have learned from teaching poetry that you might not have known before?  Has it changed the way you write?  Are there certain anthologies or books you find particularly useful for teaching?

Denise Duhamel:
I have learned a lot from teaching.  In order to explicate poems to my students and make up assignments, I have to really take poems apart in a way that I don’t when I’m just reading to enjoy them.  I am actually using The Best American Poetry 2008 in my undergraduate poetry class this semester with great results.  My students were shocked by Moira Egan’s double sonnet about “69.”  It’s good that something can still shock twenty-somethings.  Other anthologies that are great for teaching are Stand Up Poetry (Charles Harper Webb) and American Poetry Now: Pitt Poetry Series Anthology (Ed Ochester.)  I usually teach anthologies in undergrad classes and individual books in grad classes.

7.

Nin Andrews:
I love the structure of Ka-Ching. I love the way you have the chapter titles above an image of a $100,000 bill.  (I've never seen a $100,000 bill before.)  How did you come up with the structure?  And with the idea of using the images of bills? 

Denise Duhamel:
Thanks, Nin!  I found the play money at a thrift store and had to have it.  I decided to write the poems directly on the backs (which were blank.)
http://www.coconutpoetry.org/duhamel2.htm
The designer at University of Pittsburgh Press was able to recreate what started as a visual poetry project.

8.

Nin Andrews:
In your poem, $300,000 you write about how women are uncomfortable talking about money.  I'm wondering if the topic of money, a theme in many of the poems in this book, was hard to write about.  Did it feel taboo?

Denise Duhamel:
It totally felt (and feels) taboo.  I had no idea when I wrote these poems that our economy was going to nearly collapse.  Ka-Ching! indeed.  Yet I knew there was something about money that people weren’t talking about.  I am very interested in what Sharon Olds calls “saying the unsayable” or rather using poetry to approach subjects that aren’t necessarily brought up in polite conversation.

9.

Nin Andrews:
I love all your books.  But this new collection, Ka-Ching, is my absolute favorite.  It's one of those books I will always want to have on my desk.  It's at times seriously funny and at times funnily serious and at other times- just seriously serious.  But always it is deeply moving.  Was writing it in some way different from writing your other books?  Did it have a different evolution?

Denise Duhamel:
Thank you, Nin!  I wish you lived with me for my bad low self-esteem days.  I didn’t realize that I’d written so much about money until I sat down with all my poems.  Stephanie Strickland helped me put the book together—she has an amazingly organized and intuitive mind.  I knew my book was about loss and luck (good and bad), but I hadn’t really seen the money aspect—even though there were those ten prose poems written on play money.  So I think perhaps if there was an evolution, it was slow.  But I think I am finally (after decades) getting the hang of the prose poem.

Nin Andrews Interviews Denise Duhamel, Part 1

1.

Nin Andrews:
You grew up in Rhode Island.  Can you say a few words about your childhood?  At what age did you first think: I want to write poetry? Was that a dream they understood?  Did your parents support your writing?

Denise Duhamel:
I grew up in Woonsocket, RI during the 60s and 70s.  It was a dying mill town at that time.  Very working class.  There wasn’t a bookstore, but there was a library, which I really loved.  I went there with my grandmother who was also a big reader of mysteries and I would take out as many books as possible.  I first knew I wanted to be a writer when I was ten. I had extremely bad asthma and spent part of the 4th grade in a children’s hospital.  I started writing stories and making “books” (on loose leaf paper with hand-drawn covers) and giving them to the other children in the hospital.  I remember having a homework assignment to write about a pet—the irony was not lost on me.  I was allergic to animals and everything else, which is why I was in the hospital.  So I wrote a story about a bee (I was allergic to their stings) that lived in a woman’s beehive hairdo.

My father was a baker—he finished 8th grade, but then had to quit school to work to help support the family.  My mother was a nurse—she was the Valedictorian of her high school class and got a scholarship to college.  The guidance counselor told her she had two choices—nurse or schoolteacher.  This was 1954.  My parents weren’t exactly thrilled about me becoming a writer.  They saw my chance to go to college as a chance to make more money than they did, not as a chance for artistic freedom.  Still, they accepted my decision.  I think my father was proud of me—he died in November of 2008.  My mother is too.  I think they both wished I’d written less about sex.

2.    

Nin Andrews:
One thing I adore about your poetry is your voice. It's so natural, so conversational.  Even in your formal poems. I feel as if I am sitting right next to you, leaning closer so I don't miss a word.  Is that a conscious choice?  I know David Kirby talks about something he calls "talk poetry" . . . ??

Denise Duhamel:
Thank you!  David Kirby calls that style “ultra-talk,” like we would want to sound if we were smart and sassy during every conversation. 

3.

Nin Andrews:  
What was the first book of poems that you fell in love with?  Who are your gods and goddesses of poetry now? What books do you always keep close at hand?  How about novels?

Denise Duhamel: The first book of contemporary poetry I read was The Jane Poems by Kathleen Spivack.  It was a series of vignettes about a woman named Jane.  It blew me away.  I honestly had no idea there were any contemporary poets at all when I stumbled upon that book.  I thought they’d gone the way of the shoemaker or town crier—that poets just didn’t exist anymore. Soon after I read Sweethearts (a book of prose poems/short shorts, I’m not sure which) by Jayne Anne Phillips.  Other books important to me when I was just starting out were The Lost Pilot by James Tate and The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans by Bill Knott.  I wanted to be a fiction writer until I read The Jane Poems, actually.  My favorite novels back then were Fear of Flying (go figure!) and The Catcher in the Rye.
Now my favorite poets include YOU!  Well, you know this, but it must be stated for the record.

4.    

Nin Andrews:
What is your favorite film? Movie star?

Denise Duhamel:
 One of my favorite movies is Something Wild, which came out in 1986.  I have the poster and the soundtrack.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot—how it blended romantic comedy, road movie, and thriller all in one.  It was, I think, Jonathan Demme’s best movie.  But I haven’t seen it in a really long time—I hope it’s still as amazing as I remember it.  Here’s the end credits.

My favorite movie star is Sean Penn.  He is part bad boy, part political spokesman.  I have seen every movie he’s ever made.  Plus he used to write poetry—I kid you not.  And he was on the Stephen Colbert show with Robert Pinsky.  How cool is that?

A chat with Michelle McEwen [by Didi Menendez]

Michelle although I have never published you, I wanted to interview you on the BAP blog because I dug some poems you posted up on Ron Androla's board (Pressure Press). How do you feel about poetry communities and sharing your work online this way?

I am all for poetry communities, especially if I can test out a poem before, say, reading out loud at a poetry reading. I love and appreciate the feedback-- especially if people are honest. It's like a workshop.

The poems in the forum I mention above are about "cooking". Is food one of your muses?

Food is a recent muse because I have been honing my skills in the kitchen. To me, there is something poetic about the preparation of food and the heat involved and the measuring and the smell and the toothpick-test. "Oven" is a poetic word to me.  Although I say food is a recent muse,  when I read old poems of mine (poems I keep in a "poems that need work" folder), I notice that I did mention fruit a lot. 

Poems that need work folder....That is interesting. How do you know they need work? Were they rejected by an editor or did you decide they were not working for you at some point?

When a poem isn't working, I won't even submit it anywhere.  Usually the ones that "work" are the ones I get while standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a book (any book) in my hand. I "talk" the poem first and then I write it down. I can tell when a poem isn't working—if I'm "talking" it and I keep stuttering and stopping; I will write it down anyway and put it away in the folder.

Well I want to see one of the poems. Would you please share one of these "not working" poems with us?

Um boy, here's one called BACK DOOR

 

If I owned my own house,

I'd leave the back door unlatched

 

for you.  One of these days,

your head will jerk up in remembrance

 

of me; it will hit you - quick, sharp -

hold you where you are— much like

 

the way the right word in the right

place in a poem does.  By then,

 

I will have my own place— one with

swinging gate, slanted porch, and tomatoes growing,

 

but most importantly a back door. A back

door like the ones my mother knew

 

in Covington County: noisy, splinter-filled,

and never with the bolt slid through—closed

 

but open.  And you will come

in un-quietly — groaning and hungry

 

as always and not always for food.

 

 

This one is not working at ALL! I think it doesn't work because I wrote it with a specific guy in mind— like "just you wait and see when I get on my feet..."  and I was mad that day and usually I don't write when I'm mad. What i really can't stand about this poem is the part where I say "the way the right word in the right place in a poem does."  I feel that this poem doesn't  have that right word in the right place, so how dare I say it.

Have you thought about treating this poem as a concoction (a witch's spell?) or even a recipe