Jane Hirshfield is the author of seven collections of poetry, as well as a now-classic book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She also edited and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan; Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women; The Heart of Haiku; and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems. Her most recent book, a collection of poems entitled Come, Thief was published by Knopf in August 2011.

Hirshfield’s many honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; and three Pushcart Prizes.  Her 2001 book, Given Sugar, Given Salt, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and After was named a “Best Book of 2006” by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle and England’s Financial Times. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, McSweeney’s, Orion, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, six editions of The Best American Poetry and many other publications. Hirshfield’s work has appeared frequently on Garrison Keillor’s public radio program The Writer’s Almanac, and she has been featured in two Bill Moyers PBS programs. In fall 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop.

Jane Hirshfield speaks with poet Leslie McGrath about what it means to be women-poets of their generation. The two met in 2004 at the Bennington Writing Seminars, when Hirshfield was McGrath’s teacher.

Leslie: Since we’re having this conversation in the context of VIDA, I’d like to begin by asking how much of the arc of our friendship comes from being female?  I also wonder about what research psychologists call a cohort effect—the fact that we both grew up during the second wave of American feminism, in which women were very much on their own in many ways. It made me quite independent as a feminist. Would you speak to this?

Jane:  It’s always hard to label the sources of affinity, affection, and friendship, since the ease of them springs unlabelled from the heart. When a new friendship slips into your life, it simply feels right— you don’t feel you are walking on eggshells or need to spell everything out, the conversation brings a collaborative, living joy… Is this particularly “feminine,” I suddenly wonder? Is male friendship built more on as happily-shared competitive stresses? In any case, I’m sure our own friendship blossomed because it has always felt so completely natural to talk with you, even, as we have mostly done from the start, by correspondence. We’ve only seen each other once since your graduation, I think. Can that be right?

Leslie: Twice, since 2004—at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and again in Connecticut when you read at the Sunken Garden.

Jane: Ah, there’s my famously unreliable memory. It was that Sunken Garden reading I was remembering.  Anyhow, you must also be right that we shared from the start certain understandings, being liberal, feminist women of roughly the same generation.  I am, as you say, very much a second-wave feminist, more from the generation of equality-feminism than from the generation of difference-feminism. Recent research has come to convince me that a certain amount of difference is indeed real—though not in fixed quantities or rigid ways. Still, my feminism tilts pretty strongly toward non-limitation rather than categorization. My image here has always been that of a squash plant. The plant has male and female flowers, but its first identity is that it’s a squash.  I want to be a human poet first. That I am a woman poet also will simply be so. I have never felt the need to bring any addition to the circumstance that I am a woman, and will write as one—I couldn’t help it if I tried. But I don’t want to be told that I should write in some special way because of that, either. Writing for me is very much a process of dropping held certainties, and finding out what then can be seen.

I do question certain formulations of difference feminism—the idea that standard grammar or narrative is particularly male or “dominating,” for instance, or the suggestion that logical speech is somehow “male.” Why cede to men what surely was made as much by women? We each need the speech of reason and we need the speech of feeling. And when I’m asked the unanswerable question about the origins of poetry, my speculation is similarly multiple: prayer, courtship, work song, grief song, rituals of passage and of harvest, war song, lullaby, memory-keeping mnemonic. Each of these must have pulled poetry onto early human tongues. Most are experiences shared by both men and women, and if war-making’s drum cry has more often been the domain of men, that’s counterbalanced by the murmur that sends an infant to sleeping. If one had to guess which came first, lullaby’s as plausible a guess as any. And one of the interesting things about lullaby is that it isn’t only rhythmic humming: there are words, and those words often do very interesting things with the gestures of logic. “And down will come baby, cradle and all” is conveying the language of consequence—winds blow, trees are high, cradles fall—and like many of the stories we tell children, is really quite frightening. Lullaby, among other things, wraps fear inside safety—a not infrequent task of adult poems as well.

Leslie:  Yes, I’ve always had the feeling that you are completely at ease with being a woman. There’s nothing defensive about the range and intensity of your involvement with the world, be it a poem in the form of a scientific assay or one about cooking breakfast or your making available three books containing the work of early women writers.  The theme of the richness of our shared humanity, despite geography, history, and all else, runs throughout your poems. Always has. What I find both thrilling and reassuring about your new collection, Come, Thief, is that this theme and many of your prevailing images (the horse, the bell, the sleeve) are very much present. There are new images and ideas as well, of course. I’m startled by phrases and titles like “If Truth is the Lure, Humans are Fishes.” Oh yes, yes they are. Why have I not thought this before? Still, reading this collection is sometimes like attending a family reunion: the beloved are there, the mysterious, the feared. Many have changed with time, others not as much, but the journey of the poet’s eye as it moves from each to each is always surprising.

Jane:  Thank you, Leslie. I feel truly read.

One wise older woman, when I described my sense of my life to her, said I seemed something of a “sport,” in the biological sense. I never felt anything was shut off to me simply because I was a woman. I’m sure some of that goes back to my education—to my many women teachers in an all-girls school with a woman headmistress, and also to the books we read. If as a young person you read Dickinson, Austen, Eliot (George—ok, an interesting case), Katherine Ann Porter, Sappho, Mansfield, and Woolf, you don’t know that “you aren’t supposed to write.”

I discovered sexism’s glass walls—which do exist still, to a shocking degree—later rather than earlier. A great blessing, that belatedness. As a young person, I felt the world’s heritage of art and literature was mine to forage. When I arrived for my years of practice at the Zen monastery in 1975, deep in the wilderness and found that, in work hours, only the men were allowed to drive the community’s pickup, I was quite simply startled. I’d driven my stick-shift van with its yellow tie-dyed curtains, homemade bed, and pieced-remnant floor carpet across the country, over the Rockies, into deserts and forests, and finally down a narrow, rock-strewn, cliff-edged 14-mile mountain dirt road to get there, and now I wasn’t permitted to drive a pickup the length of the canyon floor?  It just seemed peculiar. When, years later, at a writers’ conference, I found myself in a hotel room, after hours, in which the male faculty poets seemed to be talking only to the other men, it was the same—startling, and not a little ridiculous. I saw one of them suddenly notice what was going on, and quite obviously, deliberately, try to change it. The rest of the men, meanwhile, failed to notice at all.

Leslie: Can you say what the older woman meant, in describing you as “a sport”?

Jane: In biology, a sport is an abrupt, inexplicable mutation. She meant that I seemed so oblivious to the constrictions of sexism, that I’d never bought into the story that women could do some things but not others. In other ways, I was chastened and timid, but that particular doubt-seed just wasn’t planted.

Leslie: This is a time of real sea-change for American women (I wish I could say for women across the world), who are better-educated than ever before, have equal protection under the law in many aspects, and are healthier for many more years than, say, a hundred years ago. There’s been much written about how the advent of the Pill and the increase of women in the paid work force has changed women’s lives, but I’ve read little about how the years after age fifty are changing for women, and how this might affect the culture by extension. It wasn’t that long ago that when a woman reached menopause it was time to slow down and think about retiring. But a writer’s creative life doesn’t necessarily shut off in one’s sixties. And for a female writer now in her fifties, who can expect another forty or fifty years of productive life, with essentially two generations of writers who’ve come up after her already, it’s an extraordinary thing to think about, an historical first. What’s to be done with those decades? Does the responsibility to teach and serve in other ways as a model increase as we enter those later years?

Jane:  A great question, Leslie. In answer, may I send you to Mary Catherine Bateson? The daughter of Margaret Meade and Gregory Bateson, and an anthropologist herself, she’s recently published a book on those “extra” decades, exactly as you describe them: not as more years of extreme old age but as an addition to the middle of our lives. Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom (Knopf, 2010).  She says this stage brings both new possibilities into a life’s arc and also an obligation to revisit and renew our conception of our lives’ meanings and purpose. Each of the questions a person first deals with on entering adulthood—Who will I love? What will I do? How will I serve?—will need to be pondered again, Bateson says, as one enters these auxiliary years of relative good health and relative freedom. Thank you also, by the way, for pointing out what a privilege this is, when we consider women’s lives worldwide; it’s a point that always does need conscious acknowledgment. One of the great awarenesses of my life has been that larger good luck, for which a person can take no credit at all.

Leslie: I am wondering, do you think of yourself as approaching the “wise older woman” stage of your life? It’s something I think about a great deal now that my children have their own families. I think of Jung’s Wise Old Woman archetype, a “mana” personality that symbolizes the wholeness of the self. I’m feeling the pull toward this kind of activity grow stronger as I get older. Yet how does one step into that formal role of “elder” while at the same time maintaining the sense of wonder and “beginner’s mind” (yet another term you introduced to me) so essential to writing poetry?

Jane: I immediately think of Marie Ponsot as one embodiment of the wise old woman archetype, in our current community of poets. The one time I saw her read, she had noticeably beautiful posture, no make-up, and, as I recall it, a T-shirt and long gray braid. And then there are her poems, their own noticeable posture, beauty and powers. For two other examples, I’ve just come back from the Milosz Centennial Festival in Krakow, where I heard Julia Hartwig and Wislawa Szymborska read. They resembled two teenagers, as they bent their heads together to talk on stage, though one is 90, the other 88. Their recent poems, I think, carry a similar quality: if they are rooted in the wisdom of age, they are also ageless. A poem can hold the comprehension of a life lived thoroughly through, yet at the same time have a spirit entirely new— wide-eyed, cognitively and imaginatively supple. One marker of good poetry could be that it returns its writer, its reader, to beginner’s mind. (The phrase comes, for those who may not know it, from the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, who said, “In the beginner’s mind are many possibilities, in the expert’s only a few.”)

Unarthritic comprehension, undiminished passion—these are part of what “wise old woman” poet means, for me.  I’ve not quite entered that stage yet, I don’t think, though I am certainly what the French call “a woman of a certain age.” Many of the poems in the new book reflect that. One poem is about bruising more easily, for instance, in the context of love and the body. I do write from my own life stage and age.

Leslie:  I remember that you fell in love with your current beloved just as you were turning 50. Not so long ago that was considered to be a time past the influence and delight of eros.

Jane:  You have to wonder, what was the actual truth of it, even then?  Another model figure for me has been yet another Polish woman poet, the late Anna Swir. The American edition of her selected poems, Talking to My Body, shows an older woman fully embodying eros. One poem mentions that this embarrasses her children, and it’s quite clear that she doesn’t care. That’s a sentiment I don’t believe has been brought into lyric poetry before. Swir’s poems are short, flintily free. Her images are intimate, impeccable and inventive, and that image-freedom is a subliminal, echoing demonstration of their author’s spirit. Such poets change our idea of what “old woman” is, and what“old” is. I admire this without dismissing what must also be learned from the truly final stages of aging, in which all powers begin entirely to abandon a person. Or animal—my little cat now is failing, and she is teaching me something of the dignity with which that can be done. Past words, outside words, there is still awareness, and it has a quality that can be transmitted.

Leslie: I want to be sure also that you know how much of the wisdom I’ve gleaned from you I’ve been fortunate enough to turn and give to others, both as a teacher and while I was the managing editor at Drunken Boat. During my years at Drunken Boat, we took on editors in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, as well as a dozen readers, all of whom I trained, and most of whom were women. The undergraduates I teach at Central Connecticut State University, who are younger than my children, are often surprised by what poetry is, what its function has been throughout history, and how they too, with the right kind of attention, can enter it fully. It’s a privilege to be a link in this chain, to pass the gift on into the future.

Jane: It’s wonderful to know you’ve been taking other, younger poets under your wing. Does this make me their grandmother, a little?

Sometimes this kind of transmission happens just because of who a person is, sometimes there’s a conscious decision to serve as a model for those who follow.  I wonder, did you know that the women faculty at Bennington at one point made a pact to speak up in the question and answer time after craft lectures, to be just as audibly present, challenging, and visibly engaged as the men? It’s a lesson I’ve carried since, into other, similar situations: Embody the reality you would like to exist, until it comes to exist without effort.

Leslie: I have great faith that as more and more American women are educated and published and as they move into positions of authority as writers and teachers, those men talking only to men situations will happen less and less often. I’ve been heartened by the generation of women who’ve come after us. For one thing, they have lots of female peers to talk things over with, and more ways to do it. There’s the “WomPo” listserv conversation, there’s VIDA, and many other online sites where women can gather. But there are still fewer female role models for them than there are for men. How do we pass down our wisdom and give our encouragement? As much change as there’s been in the last fifty years, I feel a certain impatience rise when I hear about gender discrimination in publishing, for example.

Jane: Impatience is the right response. How is it that, in 2011, we are still talking about issues of equality in publication? Yet we are, and need to. Among the research scientists I know of my own generation, the parity of respect and also a fair distribution of honors and awards seem far more ingrained than among the creative people I know—which is either an anomaly peculiar to my specific groups of friends or something quite interesting to ponder about the difference between “objective” and “subjective” fields, and how judgments are made about what or who in them is “important.”

There remains, as VIDA has amply tallied, an uncomfortable disparity in the matter of both tare weight publication and of major literary awards and honors. That this surprises some shows how much conscious awareness matters, and how much awareness itself constitutes a rectifying pressure. If two men follow one another as Poet Laureate, or in receiving the Pulitzer Prize, say, no one much notices. If two women, or two poets of color did, everyone still would. If three did, essays would be written. That tells us something worth noticing. Stereotypes of what “important” looks like self-perpetuate themselves especially strongly in the arts, because there’s no escape from subjective perception, really.  I’m enough of an idealist in matters of social change to think the most important thing is the work itself, that it be done—for itself, first of all, but then as path-opener, as model, and, at times perhaps, as rebuke. In periodical publishing, for instance, if the New Yorker could find, from its earliest issues, Katherine White and Dorothy Parker, and more recently Susan Sontag, Jane Mayer, Elizabeth Kolbert, Janet Malcolm, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith and so on, no magazine has any excuse for saying, “But we don’t know how to find good women writers.” Zadie Smith’s book-review essays currently running in Harper’s bring me intoxicant happiness, each time I read one. But women writers have always been there—to counter the myth that they haven’t is one reason I brought out the 1994 anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Writing by Women.  The world’s first identified author, of any kind, was the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, who wrote her “Hymn to Innana” around 2300 B.C.E.  And still almost no one knows that. And partly, I have to say, that continuing ignorance is due, ironically, to another woman’s fiercely effective writing—Virginia Woolf’s description of Shakespeare’s sister, buried unknown at the crossroads, was so powerful that it still shrouds the fact that there were quite a few women writers in the Elizabethan age—including Elizabeth herself. An exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library this coming January (2012) is about just that.

Leslie: Are there any other issues that come to mind, as we think here about the current state of women and publishing?

Jane:   I find it truly troubling that women journalists are so often asked only to write on “women’s issues.” This is something outside the capture of VIDA’s count, yet it matters to me a great deal that men write about parenting and relationship, that women write about physics, the environment, history, war. I want Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Feminist Consciousness and I want also Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and The Guns of August.  Adam Gopnik’s pieces about raising his children make me happy primarily because they’re beautifully written and genuinely interesting; but they make me happy also because they’re written by a man—and one who is not, by the way, a single father—who never seems to question that domestic life and family are worthwhile subjects. The poems of fatherhood by the generation of poets now in its 80’s, made me similarly happy. So far as I know, this was the first generation in world literature whose men wrote of their children in poems—Galway Kinnell’s poem on his son Fergus’s birth, for instance, at the end of The Book of Nightmares, is a touchstone.

Liberation from subject stereotypes travels both directions.  C.D. Wright, for instance, takes on prison and racism in her recent books—raids not just on traditionally “non-women’s” subjects, but on terrain more commonly explored in prose. Some good number of women poets now explore similar investigations, in poems that involve research, collage, combining the personal and impersonal, the large and the detailed, intermingling dictions and modes. Still, I can’t help but ponder that Anne Carson only reached broad cultural awareness with The Autobiography of Red, when her earlier Glass, Irony, and God, Eros the Bittersweet, and Plainwater: Essays and Poetry were, I think, equally astonishing and utterly new.

That I feel as I do, and question as I do, is one reflection of the kind of feminist I am. I want the doors to be open in every direction.

Leslie: Oh, Lord yes. I grew up thinking that feminism, for the most part, meant inclusiveness. And not just a place at the boardroom table or in the literary magazine’s pages, but the understanding that a woman’s preoccupations, be they cooking, raising children, neuroscience and any combination of these, had weight. That our lives matter to men, just as Native American lives matter to Mexican Americans, and on and on, and also that our thinking on any subject is met with simple, equal respect.

Being able to get a college degree—and I was the first woman in my family to do so—meant access to whatever the world held in its libraries and laboratories. I’d never want to limit my interests and influences.

Jane: Just so. And oddly, I never realized until this very moment that I am also the first woman in my family to earn a B.A. My mother started college, but didn’t finish—she left to work as a secretary. I’ve never thought about that. And that is the debt I owe to earlier feminists. I could take it for granted that I would go to college.

I do want to be really clear here that when I speak about wanting not only pages, but also subjects and styles to be open, I’m not dismissing the achievement of women who opened the field—I’ve after all published three books bringing those women forward. The freedom of being and simple courage and persistence required of them were and are immeasurable.  Sappho, Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Mirabai, Austen and, yes, Woolf in prose, Plath and Rukeyser, di Prima, Bishop and Levertov and Rich—all groundbreakers in different ways, and all women who made a landscape I could enter and live in. I simply want to feel that the full field of human experience is open to everyone, and that seems to me to be still the current edge, when it comes to the major magazines, particularly in journalism and other non-fiction… The numerical ratio of men and women writers must change, but the conceptual ghettoization must change also.

The last troubling thing I’d like to mention is the way reviewers all too often compare women writers only to other women, men only to men, as if women were somehow sequestered in a segregated balcony in an Orthodox temple, or as if we read only those of our own sex. Elizabeth Bishop is so clearly Mark Doty’s greatest influence—and yet, while I’ve admittedly not read everything written about him, I have never once seen or heard that said.

Simple equality’s needed, of course, first of all, but those other things, too, are needed—non-separation, non-segregation, equality of respect and of interest. I’ve been transfixed and altered by women, by men, by writers still in their teens, by writers in their eighties, by writers from every continent (if you count the explorers’ Antarctic journals).  Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man affected me as radically as any book I’ve ever read. I want to read Toni Morrison and I want to read Ellison, I want Szymborska and Milosz, I want Su Tung Po, Sor Juana, Cavafy, Laux, Howe (both Marie and Fannie), Hughes (both Ted and Langston), Wright (all five or six of them), Hillman, Dunn, Ryan, Valentine, Bishop and Doty.  This is what literature brings: realities of human experience, our own and also the ones beyond what we can know by living inside our own skin and histories, which then become our own skin, our own histories, through others’ words. I don’t think we want equality in publishing just so women can read women, or so people of color can read other people of color.  We want—I at least want—the doors to be open so that human beings can know the full story of human lives.

Anne Waldman–poet, performer, professor, editor and cultural activist– is the author of over forty books of poetry,  including the recent book-length hybrid narrative poem Manatee/Humanity published by Penguin Poets in 2009, and the editor and co-editor of numerous anthologies, including  Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and Beats at Naropa (2009), both published by Coffee House Press. The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, a feminist epic project of over a quarter century will be published by Coffee House Press in June of 2011. She is the co-founder  with Allen Ginsberg  (who called Waldman his “spiritual wife”) of the renowned Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, the first Buddhist inspired school in the West, where she is Chair and Artistic Director of The Summer Writing program, a program they began together with Diane diPrima in 1974.

Amy King: Where does writing originate for you?

Anne Waldman: From the larynx, from the imagination, from the writing of others through many centuries, a continuum I feel part of.  Each project has a particular demand.

“I say it is what one loves” in the words of Sappho. And also this sense of wanting to show the world what it could be as you make it over in language.

Amy King: How does writing function in the world?  Is there a reason, goal or purpose in the act of writing and putting your words into the world?  Is writing a kind of faith?

Anne Waldman: It’s a safer or saner haven, particularly in these times. But we are faced with the coming supercosm which will have technological machinery carry our moist warm environment of the pre-Phanerozoic micrososm into the future, as interestingly non-human as the past.  Clone poets?  No human period has ever existed without poetry — oral or written.  I think we are originally “wired” for this in our larynx-zone — it’s as essential as food, water and breathing.  Through attention to nuanced language, human poets might mirror back the world, help other humans toward an intuitive understanding of ideas, sound, emotion, gesture, visual possibilities.  Not to mention history, psychology, anthropology and so on.  But to also be a challenge, you don’t just “get” it all on one reading or hearing.  I am interested in the magical properties of language  — its sound and image, its logopoeia . I consider myself a field poet, an investigative poet, “an archeologist of morning” (Olson’s term). And to see the world, its exigencies, tragedies in a “new light” or a refreshed light through a heightened perception of language is what I try to do.  Spiritual perhaps, but also a down-to-earth practice.  A way into my own consciousness, into body, dreamscapes, other considerations of space, time, neuralinguistics, astronomy and so on – back and forth, up and down the spiral. And “lalita”- the “play”, delight in the particulars. And maybe we will leave a trace- who knows – poetry archives on the moon or Mars? I appreciate the fragments of Sappho!

Amy King: In your Tricycle interview with John Tranter, you elaborate on your idea of the “Outrider.”  Could you talk about this position in the literary context, especially as it relates to literature written by women?

Anne Waldman: It’s a term we’ve used over the years at The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, a program founded by myself and Allen Ginsberg in 1974  which is part of the first Buddhist inspired university in the US and is situated in Boulder, Colorado. “Outrider” is not “outsider”, but rides alongside the mainstream, intervenes upon it, but keeps her autonomy.  Originally an attendant on horse-back who rides ahead or alongside the going vehicles.  In Buddhism ones talks about the different “vehicles”. And often tantric deities are riding mounts of different kinds. Tigers, buffalos, sows.

Outrider is another rhizome, another complexity, not static, but in constant motion. Many experimental women have evolved new writing strategies and performances beyond the left-hand margin look and content-driven epiphany of the poem. Ambitious projects that eschew the master scriptures of shape and form which have been male gendered for centuries. There’s also reclamation back to older less theistic forms of practice.  The outrider also seems socially, culturally engaged, involved with creating alternative infra-structures, aside the academic mainstream. Less careerist, if you will. And the autopoietic view of life is circular. The “poem” as such is a metabolic machine that stores information in order to resist breaking down.

Amy King: Please tell us about your book, “Iovis,” a “25 year mediation on patriarchy and war,” and how poetry like this can enact cultural intervention in a world rife with strife beyond the “world of letters.” Or is there no division between these worlds? What is the value of cultural activism?

Anne Waldman: I’ve just finished the third book or final cantos of this 1000 page work: The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment to be published in its entirety in June of 2010 by Coffee House Press, and relieved I didn’t drop dead!  Luckily I wasn’t writing in dactylic hexameter, that would have been really exhausting.  There was a deliberate vow to sustain and be inside the imagination of this project for a long time.  Coleridge has said it takes 10 years to do the research and 10 years to write the epikos. It’s a “history lesson for my son” or perhaps all future children, and tracks him as well over time and it plays on the word “history”- istorin which means “to find out for oneself”.  As an epic, and in that primarily more “male” tradition, this montage considers and rails against war and patriarchy and calls out the horrendous deeds of the Patriarch.  Strife beyond the world of letters indeed.  But we’re all symbiotically linked.  It’s the story of my “tribe”, our time, culturally, philosophically and so on — the industrial military complexes of our time — genocide, torture, endless war and the karma of that brutality.  The inextricable knots.  And it has recognitions scenes and scenes of reversals, as epics do and also the trope of in media res–  where action begins in the midst of things.  But also contains mythologies, peaens to ancestors,  elder males such as John Cage, William Burroughs, love stories, hilarious asides, family histories, literal dreams and sacred rituals, flickering filmic narratives, the words and guidance of the child Ambrose who is a kind of Virgil for the poem. My favorite lines of his in Iovis are “Just shut up & stop always writing things down. Stop writing down your stupid notes. What are you writing down, Mom? Anne Waldman’s an idiot. She’s going to write these things & think: O I’m going to sell them for a dollar. Maybe I could sell it to a fool like me for a dollar. She’s the goddess of all idiots!”  The hero if you will is the consciousness of the poet, and she is a documentarian as well as a “singer of tales”.

So documents:  letters of my grandfather, friends, random research, travels — specifically in Asia — India, Viet Nam, Indonesia.  Myriad genres.  Epic most likely derives out of folk traditions, and is distinctly oral. It’s one vast Hybrid. And the underpinnings are feminist and Buddhist.  One of the last sections is entitled “Problem-Not-Solving which has an oral crescendo that alights on the continual unresolved horrendous tangle of Israel/Palestine. Another section is titled “Welcome to the Anthropocene” where one considers how nothing on this planet is not mediated by the designs and intervention of anthropos, man, us, a dangerous species.  And so on.  It’s a colossal experiment that demonstrates the existential interdependence of everything.  I believe it shimmers with a high burning energy and is a mirror of many worlds and it helps me locate my own consciousness which is restless and unsettled except in the writing of itself. I just hope it comes across as such.  Thus a poem that’s a parallel that’s a track that’s a system, a construct….a dissipative structure… I think of Sappho’s papyrus poems as mummy cartonage. Iovis, food for the slime molds?

In Tibetan Buddhism there is the concept of “terma” which refers to received text which may be found in cloud formations, hidden in rocks, seen in dreams.  Like poetry. I was watching patterns of light on water recently and the end of Iovis came to me. The patterns resembled words. This also dovetailed with a funny snake encounter –  a female rattler –  in the mountains. She was coiled in the crotch of a tree root, then roused, flicking her fang in that rhythmic way, and as I sang to her telling her how beautiful and powerful she was she calmed down and we performed together and then  stared at each other in silence quite a long time. The Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets, 2009) project began with a similar occasion- an encounter with a scarred manatee (also female) in an aquarium in Florida, a species that was just being removed from the endangered species list at that time and of course has suffered in the recent oil spill. I think it’s feminine energy that stops and listens. You don’t have be female to do this, however…but I think it’s more generally the case.

Amy King: What is the “patriarchy” (beyond the traditional definition)?  What does it stand for in the spiritual sense?

Anne Waldman: Traditionally in Buddhist psychology, male energy is “upaya” which means “skillful means”. It has to be balanced with “prajna” the feminine principle which  refers to womb-like wisdom. Skillful means without wisdom is dangerous, lethal, deadly in fact. It goes power-mad.  The “warring god realm” in Buddhism constantly need to create  — hallucinate — its own enemy in order to survive. It survives on this out-of-control paranoia. It is a mind-set not unlike William Blake’s “Urizen” – a patriarchal mindset.

Amy King: What is “ambition?”

Anne Waldman: For me it is an energy that propels one to make a difference in the world. You could have a Bodhisattva’s ambition – that would be the best — to benefit others, other life forms as well. It seems an impossible task, but you have aspiration, you try.  To be an “intervention” that opposes the war-machine, the culture of death.  And you take others with you on this alternative journey.

Amy King: What advice would you give to the writer focused on recognition or even fame?

Anne Waldman: Do the work. Make it a daily discipline that you are in the mind of your work, all the time.  And be attentive to the work of others. And “dedicate” the positive merit of what you do to others. And stay awake without getting cynical. And don’t be a careerist hustler.

Amy King: You often emphasize community for writers, “It’s not something that’s just handed to you…”  This subject is of special import to us right now as we continue to build and shape VIDA.  Can you talk about the importance of community, giving back as a writer, how to support other writers, and other methods of outreach and support for writers?

Anne Waldman: Venues, sites for gathering and performance, spaces of course. On and off line publications.  Collectives.  Sharing information and collaborating on proposals for monetary support.  And staying in touch with writers all over the world you have some common ground with.

Amy King: You started Naropa with small material and giant spiritual means, visioning a “hundred year project at least” – a place to build that would outlast your lifetime.  This outlook rings powerfully in our era of short attention spans and instant gratification.  Could you talk about what drove you to the commitment that the creation of Naropa entailed?

Anne Waldman: It was a kind of “satori”, a flash of insight that this could be interesting and beneficial. Allen Ginsberg felt it too, the invitation to be part of a hundred year project (“at least”), with its contemplative backdrop and a two thousand year-old practice of meditation behind it. Also in a place like Boulder – which was an interesting point between east and west coast energies, on the Rocky Mountain spine, not far from the Continental Divide.  A place sacred to the Arapahoe tribes (and to honor that history), a neutral space perhaps, compared to New York…. and economically more viable.   I liked the idea of passing something down just as I had personally felt the transmissions coming from members the “New American Poetry”- Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Amiri Baraka, William Burroughs, Diane di Prima, – the Beats, New York School, Black Mountain etcetera. A place to include the work and poetics of these elders and beyond— and go back as well.  Sappho, Blake, Dante,  Pound, Gertrude Stein etcetera.

It seemed that The Kerouac School could be a nexus for various strands of an experimental poetry that would also include ethnopoetics, Language poetry, performance and inter-arts work. And a diversity of cultural reference and practice. It seemed, also, more of training or a way of life — with letterpress printing, Project Outreach (working in prisons, school, elderly homes and the like). Also encouraging cultural/political activism and greater awareness of our role as humans, sharing the planet with other sentient beings. And this commitment continues with many individuals who have gone through the Naropa maelstrom. And we have an astonishing Audio Archive, some of which may be accessed by going to “Archive.org” and scrolling down to “Naropa”.  My friend the poet Akilah Oliver who has taught with us many years refers to Naropa as “The Mother of all Dispersals”.  But what this all entails is a vision that can’t be bought or compromised, that is sustained by a “view” which prioritizes awakened imagination, humanity, generosity, and the day to day hours of making the work, rather than being consumed by the distraction culture.

I also enjoy working with others — something that is part of the Naropa ethos — with my son Ambrose Bye, a musician and composer who grew up at Naropa, Steven Tayor, composer, musician, long time teaching colleague and cohort, and with my husband Ed Bowes, a remarkable writer and filmmaker whose projects have engaged the Naropa community, with my cohorts at Naropa — Lisa Birman, Laura Wright, both former poetics students.  And with dancer/choreographer Douglas Dunn, the visual artists Donna Dennis and Pat Steir.  I learn so much from their very distinct genius and talents.  I always carry these busy artistic utopias and comrades in my life stream. I worked with Judith Malina on  the Living Theatre production of my play “Red Noir” last winter which had a two and a half month run and a cast of 25 performers. Many of them young and from around the world. It was interesting to be inside that anarcho-buddhist ethos and speaking of “outrider”, this was it.  And the piece used the trope and parody of noir to explore the “syndicates of samsara”. Judith, Douglas…many of the people I work with have been connected to the Naropa vision.

The commitment is a kind of ethos of exchange (gift economy) and non-competitive openness beyond the actual place and its exotic history. The place could change, become more institutionalized, less daring. We will see. But its ethos continues.

A friend gave me a cloth bag from Nepal with an image of Dr. Martin Luther King on it. It says: “Dreaming.  He is still at work”.  That’s what inspires me — people still at work, and dreaming.

Amy King: You mention this “distraction culture” – how do you partake of online content and stay au courant with innovations soft-wired into the minds / habits of younger generations growing up “plugged” in, without becoming distracted?  Is there a balance or way to navigate / negotiate the work you do with these mediums that can lead to less distraction? What is your method of combining the ancient with the contemporary?

Anne Waldman: I try to stay attentive to all possible forms and have recently signed book contracts that give permission to explore possibilities for dissemination of the writing “not even invented yet”! The 38 year Audio Archive at Naropa is an endless source of fascination. Of course we need to get everything digitalized now, but that form will be obsolete soon, as well…so we’ll need to shift gears in 30 years. Even if the mode is stable, the technology to unlock the goods may have changed. Poetry implants? Mind to mind transmission?  It would be good if our memories improved and were not so reliant on being plugged in. The internet was really invented by the military. But I value it in all my cultural/ political /literary work. It’s strengthened all the alternative scenes we’re engaged with. But we still need guardians down the line.  To keep the hidden stories, those below the radar, the  “other” histories preserved.

I recently voted in Colorado on the subject of whether an embryo should be considered a “person” with inalienable rights.  Of course the notion of consciousness coming to birth is fascinating. Have you seen Gaspar Noe’s “Enter the Void”?  But in relative sensible terms: women’s right of choice is at risk, there is a huge anti-gay and lesbian and trans Xtian fundamentalist  lobby — very active and crazy.  The outsourcing of our wars, the secret agendas.  Censorship exists.  Observe what gets censored online in China, that could happen anywhere and does.  The government is coming down hard on Wikileaks just as they did the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers shifted the course of the war in Vietnam and Daniel Ellsberg continued to be active. We were arrested together — with Allen Ginberg as well — at Rocky Flats in Colorado and many of us stayed on the case to shut the place down. We are still protesting there, because the site is horrendously toxic and about to become a theme park. My point here being you take the long view. Plutonium has a half-life of nearly a quarter of a million years. It’s a different sense of time and responsibility. The speed of the Net can erroneously support the speed of the “distraction culture”.  Some of the anti-war protests we were doing in New York at Bush’s second term could not have happened without the internet. The internet helped elect Obama. It’s a double-edged sword.

We need to use it skillfully and have a back-up in place. And have strong minds, not cede it all to the machine.

Non-market driven treasures – our poetry, poetics – are considered dangerous. They are about the liberation of imagination. Most of the writers, poets, artists of all generations I know are strong minded. And there’s “sousveillence” – we can document them. So most are not susceptible to ideology driven or pop culture distractions…the slow drip of warmed over news.  They are curious about the undersides, the histories, the left-hand path, stuff you have to dig for, explore, investigate. There’s a joy in discovering the world and all its beauty and tragedy and contradictions for yourself.  The rhetoric, the “master narratives”, the “versions” of our experience can’t be co-opted. What I like about being plugged in is the experience of the rhizome, the endless Indra’s Net, the “pratitya samutpada,” a Sanskrit term which describes our  interconnectedness, both the immediacy and the long range. But I also keep up on what younger writers are doing by keeping up with small press editions, mail art etcetera that arrive all the time, and by going to readings, performances. I still enjoy the occasion of being face to face, flesh & blood, live breath and voice.

In the mind of the poet all times are contemporaneous, a paraphrase from Pound.  So ongoing look/study of Mayan glyphs, Buddhist sutras, various arcana….animal alphabets.  The artifacts in the Kublai Khan show at the Met Museum that are both distant and very close. Some of this kind of obsession enters Iovis. Dido and Aneas have walk-ons, a host of other ancients and their mandalas and scepters.

Amy King: What are you writing habits / processes?

Anne Waldman: Various at this point.   I used to compose primarily at night.  The completion of Iovis- a considerable effort after so many years — was a kind of hiatus.  And has happened in the wee hours. I still have a lot of undigested material I’ve gathered for this project. It’s been a filmic process. Viewing, selecting, re-running the rolls or scrolls, re-ordering- deciding what goes into the montage and where. There are re-occurring leit-motifs. The idea is how to sustain the various separate and recombinant trajectories over so much time and space, and length.  I want it to be like the span of a life, with all its concomitant  themes and interventions, surprises, jump cuts. And that it hold light, as it were. I sit on the floor often arranging a lot of paper. And consider the shape on the page.  And light on the page.  What do I know.

Manatee/Humanity (Penguin, 2009) was essentially a three year project. I was completely inside it. It went through a lot of stages and arrangements. But it had a three-day structure from the Kalachakra initiation, a ritual on the nature of time involving a central deity which becomes the androgynous manatee. The notion here was to connect with another life form with whom I am linked in a subatomic way.

This new piece- “Gossamurmur” is in a somewhat nascent stage. It has to do with doppelgangers, doubles, and is a resonant with the “Gossamer Years”, the diary of a  Japanese Heian noblewoman.  I’m trying to get back to a rigorous schedule on this. Things start usually in notebooks.  This piece already holds a narrative arc. And I’ve done some writing on Ed Bowes’s recent movie projects, most recently text for his next film, “The Value of Small Skeletons”.  Usually I see what he needs, what the gaps are or he asks me for text for particular images, scenes he has in mind. And he has his “presenters” speaking language.

Amy King: What is your relationship with academia?  Where does Naropa stand on the continuum between academic institution and the definition of the academe Philip Whalen reminds us of:  “a walking grove of trees”?  How can the feminine principle guide us in this balance?  How can someone be a “feminine” academic (which may or may not be the same as a feminist academic)?

Anne Waldman: Friendly with academia.  It is one of the few zones for serious discourse. Has rooms, — heated even — fantastic libraries.  Modest resources, but still feels its responsibility to cultivate the mind and in certain places there’s considerable respect for the traditions I’ve been so much a part of- the second generation of the New American Poetry and the activism and women’s work of the counter-cultural Sixties & Seventies. And a commitment – in many places — to serious poetics study. And archival work. San Francisco State, Buffalo, PENN, The Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Ann Arbor (where my archive resides). The PhD program at CUNY is impressive, very creative poetics scholarship going on there.  The Lost and Found series that emanates from that program is crucial recovery/investigative work. There are recent pamphlets, among them Darwin & the Writers by Muriel Rukeyser, and the upcoming Mysteries of Vision: Some Notes on H.D. as well as R.D.’s H.D. by Diane di Prima.

I recently read at Barnard for the “Poems from the Women’s Movement Anthology” edited by Honor Moore. A group of us, including Jorie Graham and Eileen Myles, were introduced  by young women at Barnard in a comprehensive way. We were all impressed with their intelligence, composure, passion. I am also charmed by students I encounter from the Pratt and New School creative programs and the new Long Island University MFA program situated in Brooklyn and directed by Jessica Hagedorn (with Lewis Warsh also in charge & designing curriculum) where I am currently teaching a  workshop. Any universities and colleges that have guest reading series and residencies are keeping the poetry wheel turning.

Philip’s “walking grove of trees” has to do with the Naropa Outrider ethos, that the magic   and sparks occur in the interstices  of the pedagogy.  When your mind might wander as you walk outside the great but stuffy halls, clocks, desks, ivy towers of academe. The Kerouac School is both a reading and writing program with a printshop. The Summer Writing Program is a unique component with both activism and contemplative themes and discourse-driven community — panels, colloquia. An ecopoetics class might find itself visiting Rocky Flats or on top of Bald Mountain, or surveying algae at the Sawhill ponds. Several anthologies give the flavor and content of this poetics, including Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action, edited with Lisa Birman.  The lineage of Black Mountain, classes going way overtime and into the night, the old Bohemian café model, engaging an “elder” over a drink, etcetera. When I worked with the Schule fur Dicthung in Vienna and one session in Frankfurt we held our classes in the Art Schools and cafes.   Europe doesn’t have the MFA writing model yet. In an interview I did with Joanne Kyger in the Civil Disobediences anthology  as an answer to a question about  the economics of poetry she speaks of how she hasn’t seen the “outlaw” tradition in some time. “More poets now seem to be published by university presses, speak at “conferences”, earn attractive incomes, have high standards of living, get stuck in graduate poems writing about poets who were “rebels”, and seem rather bland and formulaic….The whole occupation of poet, if it does exist as an identity in the current society, is one that has to do with spiritual, cultural practice of words, and it can’t be bought.”

A feminine academe could bring the poetry calling and practice back to the source, and explore the feminine history of this literary outrider world. And it’s happening already. At some of the places I’ve mentioned.

Amy King: You write about the birth of your son as the inspiring turning point in your relationship with the planet and people; how has this attitude evolved over time?  How do you collaborate with your son, Ambrose, and how has your work mutually influenced each other?

Anne Waldman: The unconditional love one has for a child is a great teaching — how that could extend to others. And then the child as a reminder and goad of one’s hope and fear. That cuts deep. The child is the rahula -- the chain, the attachment.  It’s unspeakably intense.  And this creates greater empathy with a woman in Palestine, for example, who has just watched her own child blown to pieces, and is climbing trees and gathering up the child’s body parts in a basket. As a mother one might feel a small part of the depth of that loss and sorrow.  Or any mother’s loss, we are surrounded by it…it’s unconscionable the suffering that’s inflicted on women and children on this planet…it’s a source of great rage. There have been extraordinary movements in history- I think of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Disappeared) in Argentina. And naturally the delight as well, the child coming to language, to humor, to parity.

And then how he’s his own person, willful, opinionated, impossible at times. But Ambrose and I have shared a rich life together — he’s part of this interesting inter-generational community, having grown up at Naropa. And he traveled with me quite bit as a child, specifically to Bali where he studied gamelan.  We work very well together collaborating with his music and my poetry, he knows my oral palette. He’s able to generate layered textures, some really astonishing things. He’s recently inter-cut some of the Iovis text with the refrain “Remember Qana!” with lines of another piece entitled “Cry Stall Gaze” (a text responding to the work of painter Pat Steir) and the results are powerful.  We’ve been performing parts of the Manatee/Humanity Suite and we’re building a new album which includes some of this material and parts of the epic. It’s called The Milk of Universal Kindness which should be ready in by the summer of 2011.

I also have a step-daughter Althea whose life I follow. She’s made a commitment to a non-urban lifestyle, though she’s a photographer and writer.  These youth are links to a greater world. How they navigate or trans-migrate is endlessly fascinating.

Amy King: Can you tell us something about your position as a woman poet in your earlier, formative years (around the period of your directorship of the Poetry Project) and your relationship with other women poets?  Anne Waldman, Bernadette Meyer, Diane di Prima, Barbara Guest – the names of women actively engaged and reading in the New York scene seem to be few compared to the male stars of the day – were you treated and received with the same respect and expectations as your male counterparts? Did you have female role models and mentors?

Anne Waldman: The ur-years: my mother Frances who dropped out of college, left America in 1929 and lived in Greece a decade with an utopian community. Who was an auto-didact, in love with poetry, translated some of the surrealist Cesar Moro and her former father-in-law the Greek poet Anghelos Sikelianos. Helen Murphy, a drama teacher for children at the Greenwich House community center in Greenwich Village. Kim Hunter the actress who played Stella in “A Streetcar Named Desire” who was the mother of my best friend in high-school. I lived with her when I worked my first summer backstage at the Shakepeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut.  She was Rosalind in “As You Like it”. Her approach as a performer was hermetic, she worked from within.  Jessica Tandy as Lady Macbeth was also amazing. Chilling. Various teachers at Bennington: Barbara Hernstein Smith, sharp as a whip on Milton, Pope, and Keats, and Kit Foster who taught Virginia Woolf and showed one how to read between the lines. Dr. Virginia Grace, a woman I worked for when I was 18 years old and doing a residency in Athens during my Bennington non-resident term. She looked like H.D., had the comportment and demeanor of that early  generation. She taught me how to read the seals on amphora handles at the American School of Classical Studies.

I first met Diane di Prima in the early sixties – even before The Poetry Project got started – a living legend in situ at the Albert Hotel with children, a Buddhist/alchemical shrine, and a body of vital poetry as well as a small press and the Poets Theatre. She was also self-taught, poet-scholar, anarchist, bohemian, Buddhist, and a mother, able to straddle many worlds, and who lived within an exciting community. Devotees of the real stuff. I appreciated her politics. This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards, a crucible work, and the Revolutionary Letters as well. Necessary works that caught the urgency of the counter-culture ethos. I think a bond was established then and also in the early days at Naropa. She was one of the founders as well and also a Buddhist practitioner, although she never moved to Boulder. She was incredibly nurturing — and a teacher and healer and even seer at times, and I consulted her when I went through my mother’s death, childbirth, a break-up. Ah, Sisterhood. I caught her for a moment recently and we looked in each others’ eyes and vowed to stay better connected…

Joanne Kyger is a genius. We met in 1967 and the friendship continues. She has been critical to the Naropa experiment as well. And I see her as the counter balance to the excesses, indulgences of the so-called Beat ethos. Her poems are luminous gems. She is always a person speaking in the world at hand with a boundless wit and energy. She lets you into the metabolism of her “wild mind” thinking. She is a kind of impeccable sister always telling me to straighten up my kitchen!

Barbara Guest who was part of my early New York landscape. At the poets’ and painters’ parties associated with the New York school, yet she was always her own person. Always kind, encouraging. Like H.D her work got stronger, more individual and challenging as she aged.  Her poetry is subtle. I play tapes of her readings at Naropa often. I saw her shortly before she died when she came out to hear me read in Berkeley with her daughter Hadley. That was generous of her, she was frail at that point.

Amy King: I think you already have that thing you wish for – are that thing. You are one of the most generous poets I know, giving to us via your poetics, activism and constant vibrant presence on the “scene”, all of which are inextricably linked. Perhaps you can share a final word on some elders – not only your peers but women poets from times past – that you have learned from, and what you might want to convey to poets freshly breaking into poetry now, and female writers in general – what does it mean to be a woman poet in our times, in this political climate? What can we do now that our predecessors couldn’t do, and what can we do better? Where to next?

Anne Waldman: I always enjoyed the legend of Sappho starting her school for women- a  moisopholon “domos” – a house for the muses. The little magazine editors of the turn of the last century. Stein’s “salon”, the Nathalie Barney circle in Paris. Currently, the Belladonna Press activities.  HOW has always been an important journal. As a woman poet you know the work of your predecessors. You keep reading, re-reading it. Honoring their birthdays, reading the work aloud. The female critical theorists as well. Cixious, Kristeva, Spivak. So many others. And the poetry mavens — Rachel Blau du Plessis, a fine poet as well.  Her critical work is essential. Study historical periods.  And those shamanic presences: Maria Sabina, the Mazatec Indian healer and seer, so crucial to the early “Fast Speaking Woman”.

Where to next?  Continuity. Building on the work before you. Taking advantage of new technologies.

We have more freedom now of course, that’s obvious. Count our blessings, and continue. Reclaim the world and imagination for poetry.

As citizen, staying on the case for women’s pro-choice rights, for equality in the workplace, for proper medical care, and working on perhaps of all gender “difference”.  And supporting women in other parts of the world.  Pick our focus, your “battles”.  I’ve seen some advancement in my lifetime but you can’t get taciturn. The environmental degradation is more intense than ever and the ignorance in this country is astonishing.  Being teachers is important, in all spheres.   And working with others, always.

Amy King: VIDA co-founder Cate Marvin recently shared a poem you wrote in 1971, “Icy Rose,” with her class, and they were excited by how the poem moved and seemed to be about empowerment.   Can you talk a little about the experience of writing this poem?  How did it originate?

Anne Waldman: “I see rose,” the pun of course.   The rose as the long trope that Gertrude Stein invokes in “a rose is a rose is” etc.  Perhaps it was written in that lineage of reclaiming the rose for women. It was winter at the time, and the image in my mind was of a crystalline rose, that could emanate and expand and maintain its intellectual “cool” integrity.

As I sat in the back row of Tishman Auditorium on the evening of Friday, October 29, 2010, the Academy of American Poets 2010 Awards Ceremony, I couldn’t help but notice a pronounced regression into one of the uglier components of the American literary tradition. The Academy presented its seven annual awards. All seven went to men.

Is this a statistical aberration? The product of separate juries and judges acting independently? Tradition by any other name is still tradition. Something so lopsided demands examination, lest we continue to accept these comfortable “lapses” into the patriarchal tradition that is still very much a part of American poetry. We ought never be presumptuous about what goes on behind closed doors.

Maybe that’s too bold a statement. Last year, five of the seven prizes went to women. And after all, The Academy, headed by Executive Director Tree Swenson, provides strong, female leadership and seems earnest in representing diverse work from poets of different locations, aesthetics, ethnicities and statuses. In the previous fifteen years, The Academy’s prizes went to forty-one men and thirty-nine women.

These numbers may seem reassuring, but keep in mind that they are not representative of an overall balance in individual prizes. For example, between the years of 1995 and 2010, the Wallace Stevens Award – the Academy’s most distinguished prize, which recognizes “proven mastery in the art of poetry” – was awarded to twelve men and only four women. It would seem that traditionally speaking, men are the masters.

While I don’t believe that The Academy of American Poets Awards are representative of the poetry world at large, they certainly are an influential force in recognition of poets’ work. Also, we should not forget that The Academy is certainly not the only organization with such imbalance. In fact, they have done better than most. Ultimately, what is most disturbing to me is not that this year’s prizes were all awarded to men, but that so many find this fact, this chance occurrence, acceptable. Even if it is an anomaly, a deviation from the normal equilibrium and equity, doesn’t it warrant a closer look? Shouldn’t we be surprised and moved to conduct a closer examination of the role of sex and gender in American poetry?

Yet, at the awards ceremony, the role of poetry master was solidified by the troubling fact that five of seven award presenters were female. This meant that, for most of the evening, the audience of eminent poets, young poets, students and the people they love watched women applaud and glorify the genius of the male poets.

Let me immediately dispel the misconception that may arise from my previous statement. Galway Kinnell is quite deserving of the Wallace Stevens Award. Much of his work is masterful. But I refuse to pretend that in the last fifteen years, there have been only four women whose long careers merited this achievement.

The fact is I’m growing impatient with the majority’s willingness to ignore these statistical “anomalies.” Let’s take another example: The Academy’s Raiziss / de Palchi Translation Award. Since 1995, eleven men and only two women have received the prize. There was, during that time, one case in which the award went to male/female co-translators. When the numbers are equally representative of each sex, they are touted, and it would seem that we are all supposed to feel warm and satisfied with the state of American poetry.

The poetry world should no longer tolerate such numb acceptance when it comes to inequality in ethnicity or sexuality. I don’t claim to know how many women versus men make up the readership of American poetry, and I’m reluctant to say that women are too complacent or too fearful to rattle the cage. I don’t think that’s true; I know it’s not true. I also know that tradition is inherited; it’s in our blood, embedded in our culture. Then how do we break the cycle of indoctrination? Do we redefine our values? Should there be more prizes for women specifically, or would that be playing into the patriarchal tradition, a sign of agreement that the girls can’t compete with the boys?

On a personal note, I’ve had poems published in feminist journals of poetry that only publish women. In fact, women’s publications accept my work more often than other publications, and so it seems that I write “women’s” poetry, even though I don’t know what women’s poetry is in comparison to “regular” poetry. There are prizes and presses dedicated to highlighting the work of women writers, which are crucial to our art and our community; their existence should not preclude us from participating in and contributing to more diverse forums.

Other explanations of these imbalances suggest that perhaps the work of female poets cannot compete with the work produced by male poets. I won’t be addressing this justification except to say that it is propaganda, a cop-out, an evasion of the real issue. And if my assertion is correct and these “aberrations” stem from the security of a patriarchal tradition that can, and often does, entirely extinguish recognition of female poets, then when will that tradition die? More precisely, when will we kill it?

Christian Teresi is the Director of Conferences for AWP. His poems and interviews have appeared in several literary journals including The American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Sou’wester, and the Writer’s Chronicle.

We at VIDA were excited to have the opportunity to speak with Christian Teresi, the Conference Director for AWP (The Association of Writers & Writing Programs). AWP’s yearly conference allows writers of several genres (many of whom are either literally isolated from larger literary communities, or simply isolated due to the very nature of our work) the rare opportunity to be suddenly present in the same place so that we may encounter one another face to face. Amy King conducted the following interview with Christian over the past few weeks.

Amy King: Christian, you seem to wear many hats. By way of introduction, would you outline your position within the writing community for us?

Christian Teresi: Thanks for the opportunity to talk with you Amy. Well, my education is in English and creative writing. When I was in grad school I started working for AWP in February of 2003 through a part-time work-study program at George Mason. Over several years I worked my way up, first through the membership department, and then through the conference department, to my current position of Director of Conferences. My position within the writing community is simply that I am one of several arts administrators at AWP. Specifically, along with Tricia Gonzales (who oversees the bookfair), and Anne Le (who oversees registration), I coordinate, facilitate, and help produce all aspects of the AWP Annual Conference. More generally, I am just one of many people––from the part-time and full-time staffers at AWP, from the AWP Board of Directors, from the AWP membership––who helps create the community that is the AWP Conference & Bookfair.

Amy King: How would you describe AWP for those readers who haven’t attended the conference? My first experience of AWP was in 2004. Since then, the conference seems to have rapidly grown, and is now regarded as the de-rigeur yearly powwow for poets of all allegiances and levels of visibility. In what ways have you, as an administrator, seen the conference evolve over the past few years – and, as a poet yourself, what service(s) would you say AWP provides to the poetry community – how do the “AWP community” and the “poetry community” intersect?

Christian Teresi: First I would say that the AWP Conference & Bookfair is one part of what the larger Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) does. While the AWP conference is in many ways the public face of AWP because it’s where people have the most direct contact with the organization, the association itself does a lot more than just the conference. AWP is the largest advocacy group for writers and writing institutions in North America. To serve such a large diverse constituency, there is a lot of programming that goes along with that besides the conference. There are over 34,000 subscribers to the Writer’s Chronicle, and there are 503 institutional members of AWP and over 30,000 individual members. In addition to the Writer’s Chronicle, AWP publishes online the Job List for writers, the Guide to Writing Programs, manages the Writers Conference & Centers program, and sponsors the Annual AWP Award Series. This past year, AWP produced the first ever statistically relevant survey about MFA programs that detailed average tuitions, class sizes, professor’s salaries, TA stipends, etc. Additionally, AWP is one of the largest supporters of LitNet, the national lobbying group for writers, and helps LitNet advocate on behalf of (and advance the causes for), all writers to both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

I don’t mean for this to sound like an advertisement for AWP. It’s just that this is something I hear a lot, that when people refer to AWP they are only referring to the conference when there is so much more that AWP does, and personally I know how much effort is involved in producing those projects. David Fenza complains sometimes that the conference has become the snake that swallowed the snake charmer, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that the conference is just one part of this dynamic nonprofit organization that still struggles to find support for its other projects.

AWP is a great arterial for networking, advocacy, and building communities with writers, and, to get back to your question, the annual conference and bookfair does exactly that. The AWP conference is one of the two largest literary conferences in North America. But we know that contemporary literature in North America varies wildly, and is made up of so many different genres, groups, communities, and abilities. The size and scope of the conference allows for all of these various groups to come together, to share ideas, to learn from, and communicate with each other. The conference has grown 700% since 2000. Back in 1992, the AWP conference had 15 events and 40 presenters; that’s hardly representative of the diversity of contemporary literature. Last year, in Denver, the conference had 400 events with over 1500 presenters (60 more events and 270 more presenters than in 2009), and in future years I hope it continues to grow. It’s impossible for any of us to fully comprehend how complex and diverse contemporary literature is, but if we want to be better writers, if we want to support literature and its practitioners, then we owe it to each other to try. The conference is not just about community, it’s about communion, it’s about a shared experience with writers you admire and writers you may never have heard of––with people you’re ultimately not all that different from in regards to your artistic struggles, artistic experiences, and artistic desires.

The poetry community is a large part of the AWP community. The two are inseparable. The conference helps poets by introducing them to other poets, writers in other genres, and publishers. It’s very sweet to see poets meet their editors at our bookfair for the first time. I can’t tell you how many wonderful poets I first came to recognize either through the events or walking through the bookfair. It makes me enormously happy to hear that you think some people “of all allegiances and levels of visibility” find it important, because I really do want it to be a conference for all writers from all different kinds of backgrounds and experiences. That is how I’ve seen it evolve. When I started working at AWP, the conference and the bookfair were less than half their current size. Again, that is a poor representation of what contemporary literature can accomplish. As the conference continues to grow, I think it becomes a more accurate representation of how important and thriving the literary arts are. Nothing pleases me more than when I see avant-gardists working in the same environment as neo-formalists, when there is a panel with two poets who have never sat down with each other to have a discussion before. I think it is invaluable to our development as writers to see not only poets, but writers of various genres from all over the country, writers of different nationalities, different ethnic backgrounds, different writing organizations, and from all the various and important ways we define ourselves come to the conference and honestly and thoughtfully communicate.

Amy King: On a technical note, you acknowledge the diversity of the literary community as a whole; do you think the conference should somehow represent or include that range in proportionate ratios, and if so, how does AWP attempt to be inclusive? In other words, how do you go about selecting panels? Does AWP actively seek to attract and solicit participation from nonmainstream literary communities? How do you determine the number of panels? I’m interested in the ins and outs of organizing such a mammoth and significant occasion; it would seem the more the conference’s profile is enhanced, the greater the expectation to offer a representative cross-section of the literary community while attempting to maintain that collegial feeling that perhaps other conferences like the MLA do not foster. Do the responsibilities weigh on you as AWP grows?

Christian Teresi: In terms of the conference, the most important way AWP is inclusive is we have an open panel proposal process. Anyone, member or nonmember, is welcome to submit a panel proposal. Another way AWP is inclusive is that we have a democratically elected board. The AWP Board of Directors is elected by the membership. Diversity and artistic excellence are the chief goals of the AWP conference. We have over 500 institutional member programs that are all generating diverse proposals. The 500 plus bookfair exhibitors we have annually at the conference also generate diverse proposals. AWP is a service organization, and because of that it’s the conference’s job to accept the highest quality programming possible that best serves the AWP membership. To do that, AWP assembles a committee of board members, staff, and members from the organization. AWP brings together a qualified group of people with varied backgrounds, and as a result the opinions about what the highest quality programming is will vary from person to person. More importantly, because the board members rotate off the board, and they rotate on and off the committee, the committee and the collective point of view of the committee is always changing. When you look at the totality of the number of events we produce, in many cases there is a lot of variation in the accepted panels from year to year. What is thought of as a high quality event one year is not necessarily going to make the cut the following year. The process is a little like having a guest editor at a magazine, except that we have many guest editors in any given year.

The process for ranking the proposals is based partially on how most arts councils rank their proposals. We want the process to be as democratic and transparent as possible. We are always thinking about ways in which we might improve those goals. A detailed explanation of the “Selection & Scoring Process” can be found on the AWP website, but in short what happens is each committee member ranks the proposals within the given modules based on a set of defined criteria. The committee’s aggregate scores are then averaged, and the highest scoring proposals within each module are accepted. AWP developed the system of modules, or “Types of Events,” to help ensure a balance between the variety of issues and topics that interest our constituents. The number of panels is simply determined based on the amount of space we have available at the hotels and convention centers to accommodate those events. I always wish we have more space, and though we have expanded the conference greatly in recent years (and are continuing to do so), meeting space in hotels and convention centers is expensive, and so we have to weigh the costs of expanding against what that would mean to the attendees. That is to say, we have to expand in a responsible way where the costs of expanding are not going to negatively affect the conference attendees and AWP’s members.

Current and past AWP conference committee members have reached out to all kinds of literary communities outside of AWP. The publishers, especially, don’t represent academe, but countless writers outside of AWP. I’m sure some of those communities would be considered nonmainstream, and some of them wouldn’t, but that would depend on whom you were speaking with. Almost all poets are nonmainstream since their readership is tiny, compared to broadcast media, films, and other literary genres. Even the most popular poet struggles in a lifetime to sell as many books as J.K. Rowling sold in the last twenty-four hours. Because the totality of contemporary literature is vast beyond any one individual’s comprehension, “nonmainstream” means different things to different people. The AWP board and conference committee members reach out to individuals and organizations to encourage them to submit panel proposals. I have also encouraged individuals and organizations to submit proposals. The thing to remember is that the panel proposals process is an open one adjudicated by representatives of the AWP membership for the AWP membership, and for lovers of literature. If you look at the list of Sponsors and Literary Partners for this year’s conference, there are a lot of different groups represented, there are a lot of different voices; we listen to them all, and there are a lot more voices when you consider the overall landscape of the accepted events.

The responsibilities involved with organizing a growing conference of this size with the resources we have available to us are enormous. I lose a lot of sleep thinking about them, but I also feel extremely privileged to have those responsibilities. The panel proposal process is incredibly competitive, so we’re always going to disappoint someone. I know the conference committee members find the process hard because there are always going to be good panels that do not make the cut simply because we do not have the space. All we can do is constantly be thinking about ways in which the conference can improve. I feel privileged to be able to have conversations about how to improve the conference. At the end of the day we’re talking about helping artists, and more importantly, we’re talking about facilitating art, and in my mind there is no greater community to be involved with.

Amy King: I think some folks go for the bookfair alone; it’s such a fantastic scene with mainstream and indie presses sitting side-by-side, often offering rare and forthcoming books not easy to find elsewhere. Is there a rhyme or reason to how these folks are organized?

Christian Teresi: The bookfair is such an important part of what the conference does. Our annual conference survey regularly ranks the bookfair as the number one most helpful component to the attendees. The past several years have yielded tremendous growth, not only in size, but also in the scope of what the bookfair is able to accomplish. This growth is due, in large part, to the involvement of the exhibitors. Frankly, the conference would not be possible in its current state without all the journals, magazines, trade publishers, independent presses, and literary organizations that make up the bookfair and represent what I believe is the best of contemporary literature. Obviously, the conference would not be nearly as vibrant or interesting without them. We’re always working on keeping the fees for the bookfair as low as possible as both a way to help our exhibitors and to encourage new exhibitors.

To be able to produce an exhibit as large as the AWP bookfair organization is the key. Last year in Denver, we nearly sold out a space that was 105,000 square feet. Years ago we developed the Placement Point System to help us organize the tables and booths in a transparent way. The system relies most heavily on the date of purchase and sponsorship, but also factors in credit for those organizations that have participated in the bookfair for multiple years and have supported the conference in other ways. Simply, priority placement is given to the exhibitors who have the highest total points, and then we work our way down the list from highest to lowest. The system provides advantages to both new exhibitors and returning exhibitors to allow them to get good placement. The primary reason you’ll see such different presses, journals, and organizations adjacent to each other is because the system allows for such movement. That sort of systematic variety, in my opinion, is an important aspect to the bookfair because it helps create conversations between groups that might not otherwise have an opportunity for dialogue.

Amy King: I know a few of the larger conferences now offer childcare. Will AWP do the same soon? Is it in the works?

Christian Teresi: AWP received twenty-two requests for on-site childcare at the conference as part of our 2010 Annual Conference Survey. While we certainly appreciate the needs of our members with young children, on-site childcare is unfortunately unfeasible for financial reasons. This is something that we’ve looked into several times over the years, and it’s something we will return to, but at this point, with a professional conference of AWP’s size, the insurance policy alone for on-site childcare would force us to dramatically raise conference rates for all attendees. When we last looked into it, it was a $50,000 project, with liability insurance comprising the bulk of that, and, in spite of the insurance, the liability exposure remained very high. It is also important to keep in mind that in order to conduct on-site childcare at this level we would need to hire professional fully licensed providers who work at a premium in any of the major cities the conference visits. Because of these reasons, and because AWP is a nonprofit that must be constantly concerned with the costs of conference services and their effect on our attendees, on-site childcare is simply not possible at this time. I spoke with an MLA administrator a few months ago, and it’s for exactly these reasons that they stopped offering childcare at their conference. However, whenever possible we will provide information on local childcare providers as recommended by the hotel, and attendees can contract with them individually. We will work toward making this information available both on the website and in the conference program.

Amy King: Do you have any standout conference moments that you might share? I mean, most people strive to love the job they do, and you are obviously invested in cultivating this conference so that it continues to grow constructively and inclusively. But on a personal level, what are some of the interactions, panels, speeches, or readings that made an impression on you? Additionally, do any specific facets or features of the conference make your work feel particularly worthwhile each year?

Christian Teresi: The 2011 conference in D.C. will be the ninth I’ve worked for AWP. I’ve never been to the conference as an attendee. I actually haven’t been able to sit through an entire event since the 2003 conference in Baltimore when I was only an intern. I almost made it through the entirety of Michael Chabon’s keynote address this year, but was called away towards the end. I was also happy to see a little of events with Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Barbara Ras, Gary Snyder, and Anne Waldman, among others, but not as much as I would have liked. The problem is that during the conference I’m working the entire time. I’ll get calls from AWP staff, or the hotel, or the convention center at all hours. During the conference my phone doesn’t stop ringing. It’s kind of the worst part of my job that I get to help produce this great thing and most of the actual outcomes I only see from behind the scenes. I was particularly moved when I saw Lucille Clifton speaking at a tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks at the 2009 conference in Chicago, but unfortunately I was also called away then and didn’t see the entire event.

So in terms of standout moments, I have to rely on other people’s opinions to see what they’re enjoying. I talk to a lot of attendees––strangers, colleagues, and friends––about which events standout and which events they think didn’t work particularly well. Ultimately, the AWP conference has very little to do with what I think anyway; what matters is what the AWP members and the conference attendees think. Though I don’t get to see much of the conference, I feel very lucky to be able to honestly say I love my job. I particularly love my job when I’m at the conference and people look like they’re having a good time, or when after an event they seem inspired; the standout moments for me are when an attendee tells me how much they’re enjoying themselves. I don’t get to see much, but I do have the great privilege of meeting a lot of people whose work I deeply admire. So when I get to meet people like Charles Baxter, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Donald Hall, Marilynne Robinson, Leslie Marmon Silko, and C.K. Williams, those are really good moments. For the upcoming conference, I’m particularly looking forward to events with Rae Armantrout, Adrian Blevins, Junot Diaz, Stephen Dunn, Susan Howe, Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Claudia Rankine, and Charles Wright, to name a few. Hopefully I’ll be able to see at least part of some of those events.

Amy King: Let’s switch gears now. You’re also a poet who conducts the occasional interview. Do these roles complement your duties as Director of Conferences?

Christian Teresi: I’m not sure how much my role as an interviewer complements my role working on the conference. The interviews aren’t in any way part of my job, and are really only kind of a selfish thing on my part in that they all initially begin for my own education. Most of the day to day activities of the way I make a living don’t directly have much to do with literature, but one of the great things about my job is I have contact with amazing writers. As a lover of literature, to be able to sit down with some of these people and have a conversation about their lives, and about literature, has made for some really cool moments for me personally. The interviews are really just one way for me to continue my education now that I’m no longer in school. So to be able to sit down and talk with Marie Howe, Alan Shapiro, or Natasha Trethewey and listen to them talk about their influences or inspirations, or about craft, or process, has been incredibly influential to my own poetry. Then, of course, it is really nice to have the opportunity to share those conversations with an audience.

The fact that I’m a poet complements my work for AWP in the sense that it’s probably helpful to have someone in my position who is passionate about literature and its practitioners. Poetry is a spiritual sort of thing for me. The value of art to society is one of the few things I have blind faith in. Poetry is the thing I return to for solace and guidance more than anything else, and so for me it’s a fortunate thing that the sphere of my job sometimes intersects with poets.

Amy King: What have you learned through conducting interviews with established poets like Marie Howe and C.K. Williams? Do you have any future interviews on the horizon? Who would you choose to interview if given the opportunity?

Christian Teresi: Conducting those interviews has been extremely meaningful to me. Each one has been so beneficial. It’s one opportunity I would highly recommend to younger writers looking to mature. I think writers sometimes get caught up in the solitude of writing, and they forget the act of making art is really just the act of having a conversation, of communicating; writers sometimes forget they’re just one small part of a much larger community. The interviews are another way for me to spur new conversations and explore that community. To be able to listen to Marie Howe talk about ethical representations of violence in art, or Alan Shapiro talk about the necessity of the sympathetic imagination, or Natasha Trethewey talk about the ways she works against historical erasure––these are just a few moments that radically changed my own writing process. Those were really generous moments for me that I think made my poetry more honest and balanced. To be able to talk to writers about what does and doesn’t make for good poetry is something that’s been invaluable to me.

The interview with Natasha Trethewey is the one I’m currently working on, and hopefully that will be published sometime within the next year. But I’m constantly reading, and I’m constantly thinking about people who might be interesting to interview. I only wish I had the time to do more interviews. Between everything I have going on I am only able to do about one interview a year. I had the opportunity to meet Barbara Jane Reyes and Jay Wright at a book festival at George Mason University recently. I’ve been an admirer of Wright’s poetry for a while now, and have recently become familiar with Reyes’s, but I think both of them would make for a really interesting interview. Very high on my interview wish list would have to be Lynn Emanuel and Mary Ruefle.

Amy King: You mention being very busy with your AWP and meta-AWP activities, interviews, and writing. I’m curious: what does a typical day in the life of Christian Teresi look like? When do you find time to write and read? Do you have a creative routine/practice alongside your professional one? This query is a common thread among us active with VIDA as so many of us are writers in academic and professional jobs, doing a daily juggling act.

Christian Teresi: We all have obligations to our family, to our jobs, to our friends. We all have many important things competing for our attention. So I do what everyone does and try to find balance and prioritize. I sometimes think about how tricky it is to balance my creative life with my professional life, and then I think about my parents who managed to raise four kids while maintaining successful careers. I have no idea how they did it, but while I’m amazed by them they’re also not that unusual. Many, many parents are amazing at both their job and parenting, but because it may be common doesn’t make it any less impressive. I think about my sister who is a lawyer and has two children. My sister is a talented painter, though she hasn’t painted for several years. She stopped when she had her first child. Though I think most people have creative aspects to their jobs, when my sister was painting she was my only other family member who did something directly artistic, and so it upset me when she stopped. And yet, when she had her first child she prioritized––she did what she needed to do because the painting wasn’t as important anymore. I understand and admire that. I still wished she painted (and one day down the road she probably will), but I understand.

We all struggle to find routines that allow us to do what we want to do. David Fenza warned me when he hired me for this position that I wouldn’t have as much time to write, but being the conference director is one of the things I want to do besides writing. And so I find a balance. I write less, but I have a job that I love. I’ve always stayed up late anyway, and so I’m mostly reading and writing late at night. Even after a full day of working, when I’m too tired to read, or work on poems, or an interview, I’ll try at least to read a few poems before I sleep.

There is no real creative routine. I read and write when I can, when I have the time and energy to give it the intensity it needs. But to me, both reading and writing poems have always been a luxury, an essential luxury, but a luxury nonetheless. Think about all those people who have a minimal amount of art in their lives, let alone the people who don’t have any. Many of them don’t understand what they’re missing, but a lot of them don’t have time for art because other things are more important. Think about my sister. She’s a pretty happy person, but I still wish she had time to paint.

I’m pretty lucky. Though I’m not writing every day, I’m surrounded by people who are passionate about literature. I wish I had more time to read and write poems, but I’ll take what I can get, and I’m lucky to have that.

Amy King: In closing, can you tell us a little about your own poetry? How would you describe it and who (or what) are your influences? Also, do you have any aims or hopes for your poetry, or for poetry in general?

Christian Teresi: My poems have been described to me as meditative and lyric, and that may be true, but I don’t really think about how my poems might be categorized when I’m writing them. Allegiances to particular kinds of poetry, or to groups of poets, or to have an ideology about what kind of poetry I want to write is not particularly helpful to me. Poems require more thoughtfulness about the possibilities than a specific allegiance would allow. It doesn’t make sense to me to have a theory about poetry that says you should do this and not this because sometimes that thing will work and sometimes it won’t. You have to take it on a case-by-case basis. Why would anyone want to close off the possibilities?

I’m influenced by everything I read––both the good and the bad. Sometimes those influence are easy to see, and sometimes they’re invisible. But I’m not only influenced by writers––there are movies, and visual art, and baseball, and politics, and National Geographic; it could be anything really. If I keep an open mind then inspiration, and subsequently influence, doesn’t really discriminate.

I hope that my poems speak to the largest audience (both poets and nonpoets) possible. I suspect my hopes don’t line up with reality, but I’m interested in talking to as many people as possible. Even if only one other person gets to see my poems, well then that makes it worthwhile too. I’m sometimes bothered when I’m reading poems and I feel like the poet has no intention of trying to speak to a diverse audience­­––or when they are only writing poems for themselves, or for a particular kind of poet or reader. Poetry is not for everyone, but the idea that a poet would write for a specific reduced audience strikes me as odd and counterproductive.

I’ve also noticed that some poets persist in writing something beautiful without a whole lot of thought as to what they are actually saying to anyone besides themselves. In my opinion, that kind of thing is a disservice to the reader. One of the things it does, I believe, is create situations where a poet is writing about tragic circumstances and there is such an effort to prettify those circumstances that the poem becomes dishonest. Tragedy is supposed to be ugly, and sad, and horrifying, and to prettify it only falsifies the representation. But this is a problem with how we’re taught at an early age that poetry is supposed to be beautiful first and foremost, and that may be true in terms of form, but that is not always the case with subject matter. If someone is writing about tragedy, I want to be able to see that tragedy for what it is instead of only how beautiful the poet can make the phrase or the line. I’d much rather have an idea about what the poet is talking about than only see how lovely they can articulate themselves. When they’re done well, even the most complicated abstractions embrace the reader in a share experience. I’m reading Anne Carson’s Nox right now and she does that. Pound at his best does that. You can be a difficult poet and still embrace a wide audience. Solipsistic writing, and writing that prettifies for the sake of prettifying, are mistakes that all of us make when we’re first learning how to write poems, but when I see those kinds of gestures in established poets that’s just unfortunate because I don’t think it does much to advance poetry.

Arielle Greenberg is the author of the poetry collections My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005) and Given (Verse, 2002). She is co-editor of three poetry anthologies: with Rachel Zucker, Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections, which centers around personal essays by young women poets on their living female mentors (Iowa, 2008) and Starting Today: Poems from Obama’s First 100 Days (Iowa, forthcoming 2010); and with Lara Glenum, Gurlesque, based on a theory Arielle originated (Saturnalia, 2009). She is also editing, with Becca Klaver, an anthology of contemporary poetry on girlhood aimed at teenage girls.

Amy King: Hi Arielle, just wanted to let you know that I wasn’t as productive as I’d hoped to be at AWP and am currently looking though some of your books and previous interviews now.

Arielle Greenberg: When I got your email, I was at work on an essay for Mantis, a journal out of Stanford, which solicited me for an essay about “aesthetic developments in the last decade.”  I’m writing about the Gurlesque, natch, but am trying to write about the problems therein as well as how I feel about having developed the whole idea…it’s very complicated and I’m not sure it makes any sense yet, and I’m on deadline!  Yikes!

AK: Well, since we’ve already been chatting about the Gurlesque, this seems like a good jumping off point and way in to discussing the in’s and out’s of what it means to be an editor, especially of a movement-in-the-making (or is it a temporary trend?).

So as noted, we encountered each other online when I offered up a quick critique of your most recent anthology, co-edited with Lara Glenum, GURLESQUE, on my blog.  I don’t think it’s necessary to get into those details too deeply here, but it is worth noting that I had an issue with what felt like something of a letdown; the book seemed to be heavily-premised on queer theory and work by many queer writers, while the book itself felt notably empty of overtly queer content.   Moreover, omissions must always be a risk when one edits such a book, especially while simultaneously trying to define what it is that is making up the book.

Can you briefly describe the project and speak a little bit about what compelled you to even attempt to put together such an anthology?  Did you feel it was a necessary project?  Now that the book is out, is the work of describing what you were seeing finished?  Is defining the Gurlesque an editor-defined project or can others participate now?

AG: I’ll paraphrase myself from the Mantis piece: In about 1999-2000, I started noticing interesting aesthetic constellations amongst the diverse (geographically, aesthetically, educationally, otherwise) younger women poets I was reading and artists and musicians I was interested in.  I called what I was seeing the Gurlesque.  I created the term not as a way to form a movement or forward a manifesto, but as a way to describe something I was seeing, as a new way of thinking. The term, a conscious mash-up and nod to other literary theories and cultural phenomena including the grotesque, the carnivalesque, burlesque, and riot grrl, describes work which performs femininity in a campy or overtly mocking manner, risking being inappropriate, outlandish, even repulsive. The artists (across disciplines) seemed to feel the license to be overblown, funny and obscene about topics that were previously held up as Serious in feminist American poetry.

I saw these strategies rooted in a post-Second Wave feminist cultural moment in which women had the privilege to be irreverent and over-the-top about subjects that typically demand a more straightforward approach.  They seemed able to turn their anger into dark comedy, to go for broke and the baroque, to camp it up.

In the Gurlesque, girliness is key, and the main way I think Gurlesque poetry is genuinely subversive is its desire to put the girly—imagery, vernacular, topics and tone—in the forefront of the work.  By “girly” I mean work that name-checks some of the stereotypical desires and detritus of girlhood and girl adolescence—skating rinks, dolls, kidnapping fantasies, tutus, ponies, lipstick, et al—and by so doing, risks challenging those who encounter it to find it “ditsy” or “shallow” or “slutty” or “dumb.”

There’s more to it, really, and the issue of queerness, as well as race and class, are important ones which many have rightly brought up, but I’ll stop my definition there for the purposes of this interview.

It’s really interesting to me to think about whether or not the Gurlesque is a “necessary project.”  On one hand, it doesn’t feel at all necessary: because a) it’s a literary theory, for lord’s sake, not a cure for cancer or a new way to produce clean energy or a plate of yummy, good-quality food, all of which I consider to be far more necessary, and b) because the work I’m describing as Gurlesque was and is already being made, regardless of whether or not I came up with a cute and/or useful term for it.

On the other hand, I think it is a necessary project, for me personally as a scholar, and for the state of contemporary aesthetics.  For me personally, I’ve long aspired to the kind of scholar-on-the-street, interdisciplinary, rogue nature of cultural critics like Susan Sontag or Joan Didion: work that’s not confined by academic field or degree-bearing expertise, but which is capacious and capricious and useful.  The whole notion of the “public intellectual” is really exciting to me.  (On a side note, I’ve actually kicked around this idea for years about the intersection between the pathologies of pedophilia for young girls and teenage girl anorexia, but felt completely ill-equipped to pursue it, even though I think there’s something interesting there.)  So when I came up with the idea of the Gurlesque, I really wanted to run with it, to push myself as a critic, to throw my hat into the ring, to “make something new” in the world of ideas about poetics.  That felt brave and foolhardy and brazen to me, and it still does, partly because, as you note, there are risks and problems inherent in any such genuinely new idea, not to mention with the inclusion/exclusion problems inherent to anthologizing.

And as far as how the Gurlesque is necessary to the world, well, I just think it’s not a coincidence that all these interesting poets were and are writing about, say, adorable but bloody deer and ouija boards and rape at the same time that I was seeing all these hipsters in the DIY craft movement make pillows with adorable but bloody deer embroidered on them and the New York Times Magazine is doing long profile pieces on how freaky and spooky and sexy musicians like Coco Rosie and Joanna Newsome are, who sing haunting, weird songs about deer and ouija boards and violence.  So the term feels useful to me in that way, as a neologism for something that’s genuinely occurring in the zeitgeist.  I’m sure Douglas Coupland rues the day he came up with the term “Generation X,” but gosh, it’s useful, you know?  It did capture something real, if limited and problematic.  And it’s good shorthand.  Those were probably my original hopes for the term “Gurlesque” as well.

On the practical level, I had hoped to do an anthology, or maybe an exhibit and reading series, as a way to illustrate what I was thinking about, but had shelved it until Lara Glenum came along and proposed that we do one together.  I love collaborating, especially with other women artists, so this seemed like a good opportunity for various reasons.  It seemed like we could make a fun, cool book that we ourselves would love to own and read: that was the main goal.  But I don’t think of the anthology as conclusive, and I certainly don’t think of the work around the Gurlesque as “done,” for me or for others.

It is really a struggle for me to have this intellectual work out there in the world for others to use and critique and despise and embrace.  I experience little distance between myself and those who are discussing the ideas I’ve put forward, and that’s hard for me: I feel called out by my own peers, and I am at heart a goody-goody who wants to be liked.  I’m not much of a badass.  So I don’t enjoy the drama and controversy, really, and therefore I mostly avoid looking at or posting on blogs where it’s being discussed (yours was a rare exception!).

Looking at what I’ve just written here, I have to say that all this stuff feels really gendered to me: would I feel this way if I was a guy?  Would I have this same need to be liked and “friendly”?  I wonder how Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler feel about the public reception of their criticism, or how Sontag felt about it.  Or how Silliman feels about his.  Maybe this has more to do with personality than gender?  And then I think about how even admitting all this stuff in print, and in WILLA, is a gendered move: would a guy admit to such vulnerability?  And now this is turning into a cuckoo hall of mirrors, sorry…(she says, apologizing for herself “like a girl”).

AK: Inherent in editing an anthology is the project of tapping into or skewing a zeitgeist. I’m intrigued by the notion of a poet as “public intellectual.” Are there poets (esp. women poets) today who might fit the bill? As you mention, the Gurlesque touches on things like the femininities of Gen X, body image, American girlhood, gothic horror and the culture of violence — what other areas of public discourse are, in your opinion, prime for a poetic tapping, voicing, (re)claiming? How, in your opinion, is poetry a part of contemporary public discourse — where can it be more so? How would a woman poet go about becoming a public intellectual?

AG: Good questions!  I guess I wish that poetry were more a part of contemporary public discourse than it is, though I think the blame here lies in a culture that feels alienated from poetry.  I think many contemporary poets are doing a fantastic job of writing into vital and urgent discourses in ways that are complex, fresh, intellectual but also accessible and pleasurable.  But they are not accessed as public intellectuals.  I think this is partly an economic reality: my idealized notion of a public intellectual is predicated, I think, on not being tethered to one academic post.  The job of the public intellectual would just be to think, and write, and go around talking on TV and at community lyceums and such.  Somebody would pay them to do this: a foundation or the government.  Ha ha.  I’m partly kidding, but I do think that a country where the government substantially subsidizes its artists tend to have better public access to its artists.  Everybody wins!

But also, I think the kind of writing and thinking I’m imagining would be best produced without regards to academic discipline or a particular journalism beat or other kind of job parameter.  It would be boundless.  And boundless freedom to create means some very unusual means of an income, no?  If I’d figured out how a woman poet could go about becoming a public intellectual, I think I would be pursuing that path!

As for what the current zeitgeist demands, certainly I think we still have so much to say about race in this country (I don’t know if there will ever be a time when this is not true for Americans), and there are luckily so many poets doing important work in that arena.  I’m so excited about Camille Dungy’s anthology of black nature poetry, and by the anthology of experimental African-American writing Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone, for two examples.  I am really excited by some of the writing by poets of color that’s showing up in the magazine jubilat these days, and I’m always eager to see what new projects the poets Haryette Mullen, C.S. Giscombe and Kevin Young are working on (neither of the last two is a woman, but I don’t hold that against them).  Beyond the black experience, though, I’m really interested in a poetics that manifests the multiracial, multiethnic, interlingual reality of so many Americans these days.  To my mind, poetry is maybe one of the best mediums we have for writing into the polyvocal experience of a heterogenous racial and ethnic background, because of its circuitous, multilayered possibilities.  The magazine and press Tinfish publishes some amazing work in this category.  And of course, I think it’s crucial that we white poets write about whiteness, too.

And class issues in some ways more than race even: there’s a marvelous tradition of poets of color writing about race and ethnicity by 2010, but I’d say we’ve got a long way to go in figuring out how to write about money and class in poetry (I think perhaps they’ve gotten much further in fiction).  I still see so few interesting poems about making a living, about paying bills or deciding how to spend money.  Brenda Coultas is one poet I look to for this.  And in my latest (as yet unpublished) book project, I tried to do some of this myself.

I don’t know: race and class are pretty obvious parts of our zeitgeist.  I honestly think there’s an endless amount of stuff to write about that really needs to be written about by poets.  I’m so glad Nicole Cooley and Katie Ford, among others, are writing about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans.  I’m so glad Brian Turner wrote that book about being in the military, in a contemporary war.  I love C.D. Wright’s work about prisoners and prison culture, which was largely the inspiration for a project that I did: a collaborative book with Rachel Zucker that’s coming out next year, a creative nonfiction/poetry hybrid, on the politics of birth, the birth industry, homebirth and midwifery.  There is no lack of important, interesting, political stuff that needs to be tackled in our culture.

On a lighter and very specific note, I’ve spoken with my students about the lack of poems which describe the experience of being at a rock concert or summer festival with a whole crowd of people: that thrilling, claustrophobic, churning sensation of having a wonderful time with a huge bunch of strangers.  Where’s the poem that seeks to replicate that feeling in an honest, weird way?  I want to read those poems!

AK: The last example you give, the “stadium experience” poem, is really a kind of anthem. Is it true that rock anthems have taken up some of poetry’s ground & the ability to strike major chords? I myself am typically drawn to poetries that are, as you say, hybrid, polyvocal, multilayered.  What’s the way into such work for someone looking for “major chords,” heart’s quick fix?  In a complex, fragmented world, why this need for anthems? How does the concept of “anthem” relate to gender? And to open a conversation about your anthology Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, how do contemporary poems do the work of accessing the political anthemic – how do they move & hope to change the world?

AG:  “Anthem” is a word that crops up a lot in my poems in the last few years, in fact!  “Bunting,” too, actually.  Hmm. Anyway, yeah, I suppose the notion of the anthem is a song that is simple, one-dimensional in its desires or goals, but enthusiastic about them.  And I suppose it’s been a male-dominated form, both in rock and in patriotic use, since both rock music and war are pretty male-dominated.  But I actually think there could be another kind of anthem, a more complicated and nebulous anthem that nonetheless loses none of its riot or exuberance, and I love the idea of a gynocentric anthem: I’ve been really interested in reading and writing such poems.  I think the rock concert poem, for example, could and should be a layered, hybrid thing, to get at the crowd experience, the personal experience, the ecstasy, the body odor, the violence, the carnality, the anonymity, the banality–I want the poem of the individual in the crowd, but I want the band and the crowd, too.  And the music fueling it all, and the music of the individual and the music of the crowd, and all of this coming from a woman’s experience.  So it would actually be a pretty cacophonic and unusual poem, to my mind, and one with enormous potential for strangeness and impact.  I kind of want to see that movie about the Runaways, even though it got mixed reviews;  I also want to see Ladies and Gentleman, the Fabulous Stains.  (Both are girl-rock-star movies.)  Have you seen either?    I wonder if either feel anthemic in the candid, complex way I’m hoping they might.

I think I’m looking for the same thing in a political poem: the difficult intersections of where the personal meets the communal, the national the global. And to me it makes sense if this takes the form of an “elliptical” or otherwise nonlinear poem.  But I am open to the idea that it can take other forms that can also be effective, interesting, startling, beautiful, etc.

I already mentioned C.D. Wright and though I don’t think she gives a “quick fix,” I do think of her work as being very political in its way, able to truly change hearts and minds, and also able to work from these varied vantage points in nonlinear, sophisticated ways that nonetheless can “make sense” even to a reader used to a more narrative poetry.  But you know what? I also think it’s fine that there are many poetries and many kinds of poetry readers.  I myself have wanted different kinds of poems–to read and to write–and different places in my life, and I imagine I will continue to shift and change as a reader and writer.  No one writer can please all readers, of course.  I advise my students to write the poems they themselves most want to read at a given moment in their lives, and that if they find a vibrant and true voice that is surprising and pleasing even to them, they’re probably onto something.  I try to take this advice myself, too.

AK:  Let’s switch gears and turn towards an anthology you co-edited with Rachel Zucker, Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections.  I’m really enjoying this book, getting a real sense of “foremothers” while also realizing how little they were (not!) discussed in many of my grad school classes.  In fact, I rarely encountered many of the poets cited during my tenure at SUNY Buffalo, except Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Jorie Graham.  I had read a few others mentioned in my undergrad Women’s Studies courses.  But overall, we repeatedly discussed so many male poets seriously, earnestly, and with an esteem not similarly felt in relation to the female poets who came before us.  “Pound” elicits god-like awe and complex discussion over and over, while Clifton and Olds seem to simply be applauded for writing “women” poems.  Can you talk a little about this project, what inspired it and what you hope comes after the book?  Is there a particular contributor’s entry that resonates with you?

AG: Rachel and I decided to do the book as a celebration of finally arriving at a cultural moment at which we had a full generation of women poets who had come before us who are alive and accessible and who represent a variety of life choices.  At the time we were beginning the project, Rachel was the mother of very young children and I was newly in an academic job.  We felt the heavy limitations of “role models” like Plath and Sexton and Dickinson, Moore and Bishop: we loved these writers, but were these our only options as how to live our lives as women poets?  Thank goodness, we said to one another, that we had studied with and become friends with or knew about older women poets who had made careers for themselves that felt like they showed us some other ways of being.  We enjoyed swapping their stories between us, and wanted, selfishly, to hear how other young women poets had been influenced by the older women poets they knew, and what wisdom and lessons they’d gleaned. We had both devoured the anthology The Bitch in the House and were eager for more candid, personal essays on being a woman writer: in part, we wanted to make a book aimed at poets that felt juicy, intimate, informal, instructive, female: something other than a traditional, male academic tome.  We wanted to make a book that was as much about the difficulty of figuring out how to be a woman poet in the world–how to be in relationships; how to mother (or choose not to mother); how to make money; how to build community; where to put one’s energy–as it was a way for people to discover the current wealth of American women poets.   It was also a way to celebrate and further our own developing friendship.  We wanted to document women poets’ complicated and profound artistic relationships with one another, because that’s what we were experiencing with one another.

I can’t choose one essay in the book over another; I love so many of them for different reasons.  I will say that Rachel and I always hoped to have a companion website where we posted our own stories about our mentors: I’d like to tell my stories about Lyn Lifshin, Mary Karr, Jean Valentine and others who have made an impact on me.  And Rachel and I have hoped that the book would be nourishing to younger women writers, that it would be taught in colleges and graduate programs as an antidote to the kind of patriarchal canon you describe.

AK: You have many proverbial irons in the fire: editing, teaching, writing, mothering, moderating, etc.  Do you feel like you’re juggling too much sometimes?  How do you get things done?  What obstacles do you face and are you able to absorb or ignore them without feeling like you’re doing a disservice to your own work?  What takes priority in relation to your assorted literary hats?

AG: Yes, I do feel like I’m juggling too much.  Yes.  All the time.  Not sometimes: all the time.  I cannot overstate how divided I feel, how much I wish I had more energy and time to devote to each aspect of my life, how hard I struggle with where and how to cut back, do less, be more present, simplify.   This is the number one anxiety and reality for me these days.  I could fill this interview with the banal details of this all-too-common struggle, which feels really charged and political and relevant to me despite its banality.  (This very debate has been everywhere in the press lately, too: see the Boston Review’s July/August 2010 forum on feminism, work and family.)  I feel like it’s important to say this very plainly and loudly here because I want to be honest with anyone reading this that, to resurrect an old Second Wave aphorism, I do not actually think it’s possible to “have it all.”  I cannot figure out a way to be the mother I want to be, have the paying job I want to have, and do the unpaid creative and domestic and community work I want to do all at the same time with any modicum of serenity or contentment, nor do I see a way to combine these with the activism or friendships or other things that I desire.  I try and fail; I keep trying and failing.  I can’t see a way out.

Here comes the Too Much Information Department: I’ve been pregnant or breastfeeding for the last six years straight, which takes a huge emotional and physical toll.  My youngest child turns one this Sunday, and it’s a fraught time for me spiritually.  He is most likely my last baby and I am mourning the loss of that phase of my life, difficult as it is.  At the same time, I’m sleep-deprived and still nursing and so hormonally, there are a lot of parts of myself that I haven’t been in touch with for a long time: my libido, my body, my dreamlife.  And of course this has an impact on my relationship with my body, and with my partner, but I’ve realized what an enormous impact it also has on me as an artist: for example, without access to my dreams, I don’t think I can tap into my poetics.  And I think my sex drive is related to my creative artistic drive: I’ve noticed that when my libido is awake, that’s when I get really interested in listening to music, seeing films, and all those things fuel my own creating.  And of course there is just the reality of very little time to myself, very little time alone, very little time period.  So mostly these days I feel like I am waiting for the return to a buried self I hope and pray is still within me somewhere. And yet, despite all this, I wish I could be an even more available, consistent, present mother than I am.  I would not choose to mother less intensively, with more outside childcare or more time away from my children to write.  That is not a choice that appeals to me.

So yes, I do feel like I’m doing an enormous disservice to my creative work.  My family comes first, and then the obligations I do for pay (and though I am enormously fortunate to also care deeply about what I do for pay, that caring means more energy given away), and then the obligations I do for pleasure and fulfillment, and then, at the very very bottom, and often dropped entirely off the list, is my poetry.   That’s the truth, Ruth.

AK: I think the creative work, no matter what hat you’re wearing, is the work that often takes the backseat, most especially for women.  Unfortunately in our society, the domestic work, especially that of mothering, requires the work of the mind to take a backseat in favor of attending the immediacies of bodies and their needs, whereas such shifting is not expected when fathering; constant-sacrifice doesn’t feel built into his requirements.  That’s why men are applauded when they “step up” and father, however much, and women are shamed if they don’t mother in a way that entails complete sacrifice.

Very generally and historically-speaking, “woman” defaults to “nurture,” which entails a loss of self if needed, whereas “man” is expected to default to “go, seek, and conquer” or something akin.  This dichotomy, as prevalent and built into the fabric of our culture it may be, is incredibly unfair to everyone.  The fact is that you have completed a number of projects, while also learning in a more immediate way what it means to be responsible for enabling a person to grow, and I’m guessing it’s because you have a partner who shares that “domestic” work in a more equitable manner than is expected of him, so he benefits similarly too.  This sharing speaks to the larger notion of what it means to “mother.”  I don’t think one must be a mother to learn how to nurture, nor does nurturing need to be limited to one’s biological child.

AG: Absolutely.  Nurturing requires a great deal of energy and care, and it can be done by anyone for anyone: one can nurture a student, a friend, a lover, an elderly parent.  For most of us, it’s a conscious act that requires a lot of us, though I know some people who seem particularly gifted and effortless at it!

And yes, my partner is truly equitably involved in not just the parenting in our household but much of the domestic work: he cleans and cooks more than I do, and I think I’ve maybe done three loads of laundry in the nine or so years we’ve lived together.  And he is a warm, affectionate father: I love seeing him interact so tenderly with our baby boy, because he’s modeling such an incredible and sadly unusual way to be a man in our culture.  My partner is a deeply domestic soul–a Cancer–so it also satisfies something in him to do all this stuff.  Wow!

But even though I really could not imagine a better partner for the kind of life I want for myself and my children, it’s pretty amazing how when my husband travels for work, it’s not particularly hard for him.  He’s eager to come home, but he isn’t distraught or conflicted about being away from the kids for a few days.  He feels bad for me going it alone, but he’s not worried about the kids.  Whereas, even though I completely trust them in his care, leaving the children is very hard for me, and I actually have never been away from my son for more than a few hours at a time, because I chose to exclusively breastfeed him for over ten months.  This is a choice I made, possible only because I’m on sabbatical this year (and largely influenced by the fact that I had to go back to work when my daughter was four months old and it was terribly hard on me and on breastfeeding).  It’s not a choice I regret because I really believe in the long-term health and emotional values of nursing, and I am the kind of person who likes to stick close to those I love (I’m a Scorpio).  But it’s a choice that has severely limited the ways I get to spend my time, the ways I get to work, this past year.

(I realize I’m talking an awful lot about breastfeeding in an interview about poetry and poetics!  But I’m also realizing how much of the last year I’ve spent breastfeeding, and how much of an impact it’s had on the other ways I spend my time.)

AK: I’m thinking of James Baldwin now, who had removed himself to the south of France for the sake of his sanity and creative work.  When the Civil Rights movement was in upswing, he returned to his country to participate in a self-sacrificing way.  He was an openly gay black man who went to the south to speak for those rights, often putting himself in harm’s way, and he became a public figure overall, which he said does not permit one to be a writer.  He spoke a lot about love and hope, essentially, in an attempt to guide and nurture humanity.  I think it’s no accident that he speaks of love in terms of “growing up” and in relation to the cost of love.  He also taught while he was here for those thirteen years; he paid for those labors of love, for his nurturing of the young and his audiences, with his health and his creative writing suffered.  To me, this is an extension of the more immediate work of mothering and the juggling required.  Without looking it up, I think Baldwin said that anything worth doing isn’t easy.

Similar to Baldwin’s public service, do you think editing resembles a kind of nurturing and all that entails?

AG: No, not in the way that teaching or true mentoring or parenting requires.  I think part of what takes so much energy is the work of ongoing interpersonal relationships, of negotiating differing needs, power imbalances, communication.  One does not really need to do much of that in the typical editorial gig.  I do feel a kind of love for my students and colleagues and poet-friends, but I don’t have that same personal connection, usually, to people whose work I include in editorial projects (although sometimes these people are also friends, former students, etc.).  The act of editing feels less personal, less intimate, to me than the acts of teaching or mentoring or parenting.  Nor does it feel like activism in exactly the same way the one-on-one connection of teaching can to me.  But maybe others experience editing in this way: I certainly think editing can make a powerful difference in the world.  But I don’t experience the work of editing in that emotionally charged of a way.

AK: As I have no doubt that your somewhat dormant creative self will re-emerge, I’d like to invite you to “dream in words” a little bit about how, when it re-emerges, your creative self might look; how your renewed poetics might embrace your experiences over the past six years.

AG: Mmm.  It’s nice to dream about such a self.  But I really have no idea what my poetics might look like, because that will depend so much on what art I turn to, what reading I do, what conversations I have, when I once again have time in my life for such conversations and reading and art-following and all the rest.

I hope whatever it is, it will be more compassionate, stranger, more truthful, more expansive, more provocative, wiser.  I hope I will have learned more things about being a good person, and that my artwork will reflect that.  I hope I will be writing in a way that engages with the world, with the environment, with politics, with lived experience, but that it will still feel playful and full of joy and gratitude.  I think of Joyce’s Ulysses, always, as an example of how a writer can do this.  Ulysses is the ultimate to me in this regard.  Maybe that’s a cliche, but it’s true for me.

I can tell you that two artists I think about a lot these days and admire greatly are Maira Kalman and Miranda July.  I love Maira Kalman’s eye for eccentricity, her embrace of humanity and grief, her humor and whimsy and folksiness and innovation.  I love that she makes incredible, weird books for children, too: I wish I could tap into the same stuff that fuels my “adult” work and do something for children.  And I love that Miranda July’s work is at once unsettling and full of heart, mournful and joyous, girlish and sophisticated.  I love that she works in so many disciplines and seems confident in her powers while also emphasizing what is most vulnerable in herself and in us all.  And in a very basic sense, I hope I will be doing multimedia, cross-genre work like July and Kalman do.  I’d like to turn to their work more deeply when I emerge from this intensive parenting phase.

And in poetry, I always, always, always go back to the work of Jean Valentine, Michael Burkard and C.D. Wright.  There is something so pure, visionary, completely their own about each of their work.  I’d like to find my voice as fully as I think they’ve found theirs.

AK: Finally, what are the difficulties you encounter as an editor?  What are the pleasures of editing?  Can you leave us with some advice for present and future editors?

AG: I edit both anthologies and literary magazines, and those are very different from each other, and then of course each particular project is so different from the next.  I’ve had editorial projects where I’ve solicited every poet I’ve included, and then projects that were extremely open and public.

I’ll start with the magazines.  As one of the editors for the magazine Court Green, I edit in collaboration with my faculty colleagues at Columbia College and our changing graduate student assistants, and so that’s a process of negotiation and discussion amongst multiple personalities, frustrating and exciting.  We get a lot of unsolicited material for Court Green, and it can be tedious—like every literary magazine, we get inappropriate, mediocre work by people who have clearly never read our publication—and also thrilling, when you discover a voice that is new to you and fresh and vital.   We also solicit for poetry at Court Green, but with both the solicited and unsolicited work, I’m on the lookout for work that feels true, strange, lively, untidy, moving and fascinatingly crafted.  I’m also always looking for those “voices from the margins”—poetry by underrepresented people; long-forgotten or new poets; work that seems far-out and wild.  Luckily, those are also issues my co-editors are interested in.  At Court Green, we’re blessed, because the four of us who most often work on it—myself, David Trinidad, Tony Trigilio, and Lisa Fishman—bring distinct sensibilities and concerns about poetry to the table, and are also very open to a wide range of work.  We aim to include older poets who may not be on everyone’s radar anymore as well as very young or emerging poets.   We sometimes talk about whether or not there is a “Court Green style”—we kind of think there is, and if I had to define it, I’d say that we lean toward work that is darkly funny, concise, invested in popular culture, a little funky.

Black Clock is another story, because I’m more like a contributing editor there.  I believe in Steve Erickson’s vision for the magazine, so mostly I think of myself as trying to match my sense of his tastes, which is its own kind of challenge and pleasure, to try to choose poems for someone else—it’s like trying to pick out a birthday present for a friend.  Some years I’m not involved at all, and sometimes I solicit two or three poems for an issue (each of which have a very specific theme) and those are the only poems they print.  Issue 6 was an all-poetry issue, and even then, I was not responsible for every poem that appeared, though I chose the vast majority. And when I edit a project like this, I certainly think about trying to represent the diversity of American poetic voices in terms of gender, race, aesthetics, and other concerns…though my sense of what might be “diverse” is always more limited than it could be, which is something I’m aware of and try to keep working on in each new project I take on.

(Knowing about VIDA’s Count, I just did one on Issue 6 of Black Clock—there are 68 poets included, and 40 women, so, what is that, 59%?  My bet is that, left to my own devices and not thinking about gender any more than I do normally—which is to say, thinking about it A LOT but not trying to think about it, and trying to be “balanced”—I’d probably edit most co-ed projects 60/40 in favor of women.  And while there’s a wide range of ages and styles represented in this issue of Black Clock, I think there are unfortunately only a handful of non-white poets, for example.  I wonder what Court Green’s Count will be like.  My guess is it, too, will be about 60/40 women to men.  I hope I don’t turn out to be unpleasantly surprised about this.)

Then there are the anthologies I’ve co-edited (Women Poets on Mentorship and Starting Today, both with Rachel Zucker; Gurlesque with Lara Glenum; and one in progress, a collection aimed at teenage girls of contemporary American poems by women, with Becca Klaver) .  Three out of the four of them are devoted to women’s writing and women’s expereinces, but these have been vastly different in their goals, aims, and parameters.

With Women Poets on Mentorship, Rachel and I tried to identify a diverse roster of women poets of a particular generation (born in the wake of the Second Wave feminist movement) and at a particular place in their careers (“emerging” verging on “established” with at least one book but no more than three published when we solicited them).   We cast a wide net, actively sought to discover poets we hadn’t heard of before, and had no control over which older living woman poet they’d choose to write about.  So there was a lot left up to chance, in a way, and that was both a pleasure and a worry.  Then we asked each contributor to write an original prose essay of a very specific sort—we wanted personal, not academic essays, short but meaty—and of course many poets panic at being asked to write prose.  We edited some of the prose quite seriously; we were true editors for this project, not just curators.  And that was a ton of work, a ton of time, as were the permissions.  Doing an anthology like that one is a huge administrative undertaking, and you must be organized and professional about it with your collaborator, and pray that your relationship survives the project.  In our case, I think the book was a hard but ultimately terrific thing for our friendship.

I’ve already spoken a bit about Gurlesque, but that was such a different kind of editing: there, it was really more like curating.  I had an aesthetic/cultural theory, and Lara was fleshing it out, and together we were trying to find poets and poems that illustrated the theory.  We weren’t looking particularly to discover new voices or be as inclusive as possible: we wanted sharp, vivid examples of an aesthetic strain we were noticing.  So each poem was carefully chosen.  What was amazing—and delightful—was how often Lara and I agreed about which poems and poets to choose: we’d look at a poem and both say, “Hmm, no” or “Hell, yes!” at the same time.  We did sometimes have to argue a point with the other, but rarely, and always civilly.  We disagreed more often over the visual art, but that was such an exciting part of that project: to get to think about visual art, hunt for the right artists (although the permissions were often even more of a nightmare than poetry permissions can be.)

For the anthology aimed at teenage girls (there is no good shorthand to describe it, sadly!  We are trying to make an anthology of contemporary women’s poetry that we imagine would thrill a teenage girl poet, but not all the poems are about adolescence…though many are), Becca and I unfortunately keep going on hiatus.  I had a baby who died, and then she went to a PhD program, and then I had another baby, etc.  But we are about to start back up again.  Here, too, more often than not, the two of us part ways with packets of hundreds of poems, reunite to discuss, and find we’ve chosen the exact same ones.

I’ve done each of these anthologies with a partner (woman/poet/friend).  (I’ve also published a college composition reader as a solo editor, though I collaborated with some of my students on some of that work.)  So clearly I enjoy collaboration, and enjoy the experience of working closely with another woman poet on a project like this.  I love the back and forth, I love having another mind thinking through the same ideas I’m thinking through, I love splitting up the grunt work.  I am so happy not to shoulder the full responsibility of a project like an anthology by myself, because I want a system of checks and balances.  It’s not that I don’t trust myself, or don’t want to do the work, but I really appreciate having the eyes and ears of someone I respect on my work.  Collaboration is not without some struggle, but my collaborations have had far more benefits than woes.  In any case, my experience of editing anthologies is inextricable from my experience of collaborating with another woman.

In general, I’d encourage other women to collaborate—sure, why not?  (So many already do, of course, including the whole VIDA board!).  You learn so much from your co-editors about the work, about yourself, about your strengths and challenges.  And collaboration keeps you honest and moving forward.  It also requires you to be kinder, more compassionate, more forgiving, more open-minded—if you hope to succeed. There’s such a long and wonderful history of women’s collaboration in art and literature and politics; I like being part of that lineage.  Poets often speak fondly of isolation and solitude, and I love a couple of hours of quiet time as much as the next person, but I think the ability to and desire to collaborate is an incredible aspect of being a human animal, and as a woman, I seek intensely collaborative experiences in nearly every part of my life.

We’ve reserved this spot for editors, agents, writers who wish to respond, on record, with regard to issues VIDA and its members have raised.