Her poems “Little envelope,” “Ancestry, a small corner” and “All the faces” appear in the forty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “Little envelope,” “Ancestry, a small corner” and “All the faces.”
A: Sometimes poems have specific origins and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes I can remember where they started and sometimes I can’t! I think “Little envelope” came from thinking about the witching season and how the idea of haunting is related to memory and trauma. And then it went to accepting the chaos of possibility. “Ancestry, a small corner” is based on a moment during a trip to visit my ancestors’ neighbourhood in the Bronx, and the connection to place but concurrent inability to know what might be called the whole truth. “All the faces” came from a prompt upon viewing Hannah Hoch’s collages and then followed my own brain’s collage of thoughts about existence, birth, community, erasure and absurdity. I like to keep it light and heavy.
Q: How do these pieces compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: They are definitely in the same realm – ie writing about memory, family histories, representation and imagination. I want to always play with lines because that aspect of writing, even when it is heavier stuff, is highly enjoyable.
Q: Is that a main function of how your poems get built, the movement of playing with lines?
A: I would say that there is a logic that reveals itself in the making of the poem through the lines, and the structure and conversation of lines and stanzas. I relate it a lot to improvisational music, where something is formed through that play, even if it is serious. I have to not know where it is going. But I definitely know that that is frustrating to some readers! That’s okay.
Q: How did you evolve into working this kind of poem-discovery? Too often readers claim to require a narrative logic, but your work actively resists that (in the most marvellous of ways, I’ll add). How did that come about?
A: Thank you! I think at a certain point, reading a great variety of poets and listening to a swath of musicians and taking in the wide world of art and performance, I realized I could be influenced by all these but not need to imitate anyone specifically. Also, although I appreciate when others receive my work well, I don’t think I’ll receive great riches or fame etc from it, so that in itself is somewhat liberating.
Q: With a handful of published books and chapbooks over the past three-plus decades, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?
A: I think over time I’ve become more comfortable with the weirdness of my writing and so the writing shows that. There are more long poems and sequences. I also see the performing of the work as an increasingly integral way of receiving it, and this is because the music of words and sounds is much more a thing I invite into the work. So I’d like to maybe record performances and do more live ones, with musicians.
Q: You’ve produced three cookbooks over the years. How does this work connect to your literary work, if at all? How does one approach writing a cookbook after decades of writing and publishing poems?
A: The cookbooks are a separate venture. I definitely use editing skills in the recipes as a lot of the ones I’ve addressed have been historical recipes using earlier methodologies and measures in some cases. So in a practical sense they use form, which I know about but don’t use in a straight-up way in my poetry. The closest relationship the cookbooks have would likely be to my essays, in that they are “real”. I enjoy the cookbooks because they are a form of my work that is truly popular and people aren’t as afraid of recipes as they are of poems!
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: I particularly love New York School poets and Modernists. Give me something spare and give me something rambling. Give me something very personal and give me something very imaginative! Do wild and simple things with language! Lorine Niedecker, Edmond Jabès, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara, Nelson Ball, Marina Tsvetaeva, Charles Olson, Ron Padgett, Emily Dickinson. These are some of the folks I return to!
