Kyle Minor is the author of two collections of stories: In the Devil’s Territory (2008) and Praying Drunk (forthcoming, 2014). He is the winner of the 2012 Iowa Review Prize for Short Fiction and the Tara M. Kroger Prize for Short Fiction, one of Random House’s Best New Voices of 2006, and a three-time honoree in the Atlantic Monthly contest. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Best American Mystery Stories 2008, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, Forty Stories: New Voices from Harper Perennial, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. He has also done reporting for Esquire, and writes a biweekly audiobooks column for Salon.

In what way do you think literature has the ability to change the way people live their lives?

I’m increasingly wary of making any big claims like that for literature. I think that for people like me, literature is a comfort, a way of feeling less alone. It is also a way to live lives not one’s own, to expand experience quickly, to destroy solipsism to whatever extent that might be possible. But literature isn’t any more pure than the world it does or doesn’t intend to represent, and it can be used to destructive ends, and people who are awash in it can commit atrocities the same as people who aren’t. A Shakespeare scholar was one of the authors of genocide in the Balkans, and almost every nationalistic awfulness has tried to hitch its wagon to the national culture, literature included. That said, I think I’d rather spend time with people who read broadly and deeply. They tend to be smarter, more interesting, more likely to have a little societal compassion (but not always). Ultimately: life is not long, most of the things we chase come to naught, the things that don’t aren’t lasting anyway, and the people who make literature at least have the comfort of knowing that they made somebody they’ll never meet feel something in a future moment that can only be imagined, hopefully with great pleasure.

What was the last book you gave as a present?

I’ve been giving copies of The Era of Not Quite, by Douglas Watson, who is the closest thing to Beckett we’ve got now. In 2014 I’ll be giving copies of Demon Camp, by Jennifer Percy.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Lee K. Abbott told me it ought to cost you more than the time it took to get the words on the page.

Which author do you re-read most frequently?

There are a few: Philip Roth, Katherine Anne Porter, John Cheever, Alice Munro, Edward P. Jones, Barry Hannah, Denis Johnson. Lately I’ve been re-reading William Gaddis and Kurt Vonnegut.

What is the best sentence you’ve ever read?

It’s a fragment from the opening of William Goyen’s The House of Breath, which is set in a postage stamp of land in East Texas, but which feels, in the point of view of the speaker, like it’s set in the most expansive extraordinary dark magic laden place since Yoknapatawpha County:

“Yet on the walls of my brain, frescoes . . .”

That’s what I aspire to keep in mind when I’m painting the world. It’s all there, for everybody who cares enough to remember, or for everybody who feels enough to want it to mean or matter.

Describe your writing routine.

Right now I’m working 12-18 hours a day, all summer, a real luxury. I’m staying up all night and sleeping a little in the day. This is probably the last season of my life when I’ll be able to live this way, so I’m trying to take full advantage.

Do you ever listen to music when you write? If so, what’s on your playlist?

Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, but right now I am. I have the playlist next to me here on my Kindle Fire, so I can give you the list: Pink Floyd, Animals; Violent Femmes, Greatest Hits; The Lovin Spoonful, “Summer in the City”; Radiohead, Amnesiac and OK Computer; R.E.M., Up; Jane’s Addiction, “Been Caught Stealing,” Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here; The Beatles, The White Album and Revolver and Abbey Road; Smashing Pumpkins, “Rocket”; three Blonde Redhead albums; Beck, Mellow Gold; six Deerhoof albums; Pearl Jam, “Daughter”; three Jimi Hendrix albums; Nirvana, Incesticide; Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral; Carmina Burana; Steve Reich, Phases; two Grimes albums; Sufjan Stevens, various tracks; two Steve Earle albums; four Lucinda Williams albums; a few tracks from The Doors, Bon Iver, Fatboy Slim, and Starflyer 59; two Belo albums; a few of Rita Lee’s Beatles covers; seven Bob Dylan albums; two Jurassic 5 albums; The Breeders, Last Splash; Dave Brubeck Quartet, Take Five; twenty-seven Robert Johnson songs; ninety-three Leadbelly songs; The Pixies’ Greatest Hits; Velvet Underground and Nico; the Woodstock soundtrack; a Kill Rock Stars sampler; ten Schonberg tracks; ten tracks from the Berlin Symphony Orchestra; Cream, Disraeli Gears; Elton John’s “Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” and Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”

I also sometimes run movies or TV shows in the background while I’m working, such as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Highlander, First Blood, The Apostle, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

If it gets to be too much, I turn it all off, but the silence makes me feel even more lonely than long stretches at the desk usually make me feel. Right now I’m in Iowa City, where I have a few friends who will occasionally stay up all night with me, working in the same room, and I like that better than the running music. One friend plays Hyderabad musicals all night, and that’s fine with me. Other friends demand absolute silence, and that’s okay with me, too.

Best bookstore you’ve ever been to?

Nightbird Books in Fayetteville, Arkansas; Powell’s City of Books in Portland; Prairie Lights in Iowa City; Brookline Booksmith near Boston; Skylight Books in L.A.; the late and lamented Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor. Used bookstores: John King Books in Detroit; Half-Price Books in Columbus and Austin.

If you were standing in line at a bookstore and noticed the person in front of you was holding your latest book, what would you say to them?

I wouldn’t say a word. Actually, it’s happened before, and I was afraid they’d put it back if I said anything.

What literary landmark would you most like to visit?

I’d like to take a time machine back fifty-something years and four blocks from where I’m now sitting and see the room in Iowa City that Kurt Vonnegut covered with butcher paper when he was solving the structure of Slaughterhouse-Five.

Do you own an e-reader?

Yes. I was an early adopter of the Kindle, and now I have a Kindle Fire HD. I am still partial to print books, though.

Is Facebook good for you?

Yes. I recently spent six truly grueling years in Toledo, Ohio, where there weren’t many people who were interested in what I was doing, and Facebook was a tremendous tonic for the loneliness that experience provoked.

What about coffee?

Sure. I endorse all varieties of uppers. It’s the downers writers ought to avoid. Alcohol might get you one or two good stories, but it will hurt you in the long run more than it will help you.

What job have you held that was most helpful for your writing?

Teaching is the most nourishing kind of job, for me, but it’s not for everyone. I remember that William Gay drove a bread truck.

What is one of your vices?

I need to quit the Coca-Cola. It’s the worst thing, for real.

What is one of your prejudices?

I don’t like moneyed snobbery at parties. I also dislike coolness.

Favorite books you’ve read in the past year?

William Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic, #1. Also: Barry Hannah, Bats Out of Hell; Pamela Erens, The Virgins; Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat; Bluets, Maggie Nelson.

Favorite word?

Advance.

Photo of Kyle Minor by Jennifer Percy.

Visit Kyle Minor at KyleMinor.com.

Identity Theory

Meet Bookslut‘s new little sister Spolia, “A monthly literary magazine, devoted to the strange and to the wise.”

It’s the birthday of writer Charles Baxter. (Did that sentence make me sound like Garrison Keillor?)

Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of the Orange Prize-winning novel Half of a Yellow Sun, has a new book out this week, her third novel: Americanah.

Journalist Stephen Rodrick’s The Magical Stranger: A Son’s Journey into His Father’s Life, also comes out this week. Rodrick wrote about his father in this month’s issue of Men’s Journal: “A Pilot’s Son, Flying Solo.”

This week we are also blessed with Walter Mosley’s 5000th book, Little Green, another Easy Rawlins mystery.

Identity Theory

I Belong To Pan

The god Pan overtakes me
In a scarily erotic
Dance.

Erect, always at attention,
He caters to my every desire –
Both known and unknown.

I know not where these
Feelings stem from
That he generates from me
Each time he touches me
Or follows my movement
With long glances — when he stares
It is always
My eyes that look
Away first.

This lust – this passion
Bubbles up inside of me
Like volcanic overflow –
I crave his godhead to enter
Me and wear me down
Until I lie in a whimpering
Mass at Pan’s feet.

I want
To be his concubine
His whore, his wench

Don’t judge me.
If you had known Pan, like I have known Pan
You, too,
Would willingly lie underneath
The weight of his manhood
Without fear of reprisal
Or sadness in the unexpected disappearance
Of your ’60s-inspired, bra-burning,
Gloria Steinem Ways.

Real Talk about Back in the Day

Today I offer you real talk.  I’m not going to blow
smoke up your ass with some bullshit poem that
makes it seem like the world back in the day was
all sunny and gay because it wasn’t—least ways
not all of the time.

Yes, I had happy days but enough poets
have written rhymes about hot Alabama nights,
magnolia blossoms, and cotton fields with joyous darkies
singing the night away. Like I said,
today I offer you real talk beginning with my
first time.

I have no happy memories of the day my virginity
was taken away from me by an old man called Uncle
who smelled of Old Spice, stale pork rinds, Budweiser
and piss.

On that day there was no candlelight or mood music
to soften the pain of that first thrust or dull the
humiliation and repulsion I felt when he told
my eleven year old mouth to take it all in and
feeling there was no other choice
I did.

Imagine—if you will—a girl child still being spoon fed
Disney tales where white men on white horses
would ride in and whisk the blue eyed blond Princess
away to a land of happily
ever after.

Forget the fact that I did not resemble those girls
in the picture books that my father read to me in
a slow stilted voice each night—sometimes sounding out the words
because field work called louder to him than the chiming
of the school bell so words for him did not
come easy.

He—with all good intentions—convinced me
that Prince Charming would overlook those traits in me
that society deemed shortcomings.  He promised that
in spite of my nappy head, dark skin, big nose and wide ass
Prince Charming would still one day ride in on his
trusty steed and ride me off to a land of happily ever
after too.

But this was a lie that all daddies probably told
their little girls particularly if they lived during a time
when they were colored. Suffice it to say the Prince did
not ride in on his horse in time to rescue me from
the evil beast who ripped wide girl parts
I was saving for that first night on the day
I would wear white and lovingly give my
virginity away.  

He broke in and plundered and rearranged
dresser drawers that had been packed by a
benevolent Mother Nature and strew my
belongings onto the floor with no regard
and no plans or suggestions on how I could repack
and make those drawers neat and orderly
like I’d been taught to keep them by
the nurturing father who had been more mother
than the one who wore the title but never really
owned it.

So what did I do? I did what I had always done. I fought
back. My daddy once likened me to Joe Frazier because
he said I could take a beating and still get up
fighting           swinging.  So that is what
I did.

I scratched and clawed and fought back the demons
of the night who tried to pull me, drag me, trap me
in the shadows of that first time with the man
who was allowed to walk free because mother said
not to tell. The one lesson she
taught me.

So silence was my mantra but that does
not mean that I remained unprepared. I trained
and grew stronger so I would be ready
for that next time — so that if another or
the same came back for seconds or thirds
of my virginity, which was used up and of
no worth to me and in my mind anyone else,  
I would be prepared to personally take him
out myself.

Play Me One of Those Old School Joints: And I’ll Be Yours Tonight

Baby, you know me.

Music
gets me high. And when
you sing and play for me,
just for me,

for a moment,
for a solitary moment,

it’s. like. I. can. fly.

When you let loose with one of those
old school joints,
I can’t think straight.

And your guitar, baby.
When you strum that guitar,

when you strum that guitar just right,
making melodies hard, fast and divine –

Well, when you do all that
baby, when you do that,
there ain’t no doubt

i. am. yours. tonight.

Identity Theory

At the age of 34, Heather Donahue meditated for a few days, then burnt the remains of her acting career, which included starring in The Blair Witch Project and the Steven Spielberg miniseries Taken, to begin a more organic life growing medical marijuana with her new boyfriend in Northern California.

Growgirl: The Blossoming of an Unlikely Outlaw is Heather’s very funny memoir of finding her way in the hippie pot-growing community and inventing a more enlightened, post-Hollywood identity out of smoke and ashes.

In her interview with Identity Theory, the writer formerly known as The Girl from The Blair Witch Project talks about ideal marijuana legislation, misunderstandings about pot farmers, and the future of her writing career.

Mike Doughty said in our 2006 interview, “I’d like to get weed recognized as a drug that people can become seriously addicted to and wreck their lives with. I don’t judge drugs—I stopped doing ’em, but I love ’em. But this nonsense that weed is some kind of light non-drug is pure fiction; a major problem in our society.” What is your response to that?

Just because something is powerful, doesn’t mean we need to take it away from people. From children, sure, but not from the grownup among us. I don’t think that anybody is suggesting that cannabis isn’t a powerful plant, it clearly is. That’s why there’s all this political and economic hubbub around it. It’s like the Force, Luke. You can use it in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t have the opportunity to choose responsibly. Free, right? That’s the best of our national brand. America: Home of the Babysat. Just doesn’t have the same ring. 

In the year-plus since Growgirl was released, major transformations occurred in the marijuana policies of several states. Going forward, what does the ideal pot policy look like at the state level?

It doesn’t really matter all that much what happens at the state level until there’s a Federal change. However, I think Colorado is on the right track. Let legalization happen, let there be enough regulation to protect the consumer. Let’s make sure there aren’t pesticides in there that trump the medicinal value of cannabis, but let’s also allow people to grow their own. That’s what legalization means. You can grow your own, freely. That is absolutely not what they’re getting in Washington State. The policy that they’re working on estimates 3 tons of weed produced a year. They will be awarding (and I use that word deliberately) 200 grower permits. That’s like handing a golden ticket to the highest (sorry) political bidder. Ick. It won’t go like that in California. The industry here is too big and folks are finally starting to unite to protect their livelihoods. I think true criminality in the Cannabusiness would be taking it away from the people who built it. Not the cartels–like any big business they can and will and do diversify. I’m talking about the family grower, the single mom, the artist, the musician, the writer, the small town whose economy depends on everyone having their little slice of the pie. Cannabis is the only high-value commodity whose resulting wealth is distributed at the mom-and-pop level. It provided opportunities for entrepreneurship during the crash of ’08 and beyond, especially where I live in Nor Cal. I think the small grower and dispensary entrepreneurs should be considered in any legalization discussion.

What’s the most common misconception people have about pot farming?

I think people don’t see the families who grow. I think they don’t see the grannies whose pensions aren’t cutting it. I think people don’t understand how entire towns that lost industries like logging are have become not ghost towns, but thriving, diverse communities. It’s not all cartels and guns. In my experience, it’s not like that at all.

A character in a novel I just finished reading invents a program that eradicates all online mentions of famous people who want to be anonymous again. Would you have used such a service to start over after leaving Hollywood at 34 if it were possible?

It would be really tempting, but it would also be disingenuous. I am all of these stories, made up of all of these events. The stories I tell myself about those events and how they shape me, even those are fluid. “I am not I” and all of that, because to say “I” is to assume some kind of solidity. Writing Growgirl made me think a lot about that. The rather more diaphanous off-the-page story that I tell myself about myself constantly challenges me to reinterpret my relationship to big, internet-permanent events like Blair Witch, and without that challenge I would be a lesser person. I’m always changing, always growing up and out of what’s come before. Blair Witch repeats on me constantly, like cucumbers or chili, all the better to make peace with it. 

Growgirl was your first book, and you’re still quite young. Do you plan to continue to work mostly in personal nonfiction, or are you going to transition to other forms of writing?

I’m working on a novel called Bounds right now. It’s an erotic black comedy about a trio of cancer researchers. The theme is love and other consumptive malignancies. At the same time, I’m launching a business called Prettywell. It’s a mix of herbal and lab-tested ingredients for whole bodies. My first four products, about to fledge the nest, are Lift, Feed, Mojo, Buff, and Hump. 

Your dog Vito was one of my favorite characters in Growgirl. How’s he doing now?

He is the planet’s finest creature. Intelligent, mellow, with uncanny comedic timing. He’s five now. He does a lot of this:

Identity Theory

Dancing in the Dark

Not many see smoke as a way
of opening the body to life.

They see the slow ember of birds
dimming the blue tunnel
and feel icy minnows needling
out of hands of water.

Something they are sure is whispered
must keep them leaning
like that,
poised towards the world,
not the world
they are clinging.

Pressing their ears upon
an imaginary child just born,
the insect that goldens the night,
a name flashing
from a dark body,

a small spark escaping
between hammer and anvil,
a word,
terrifying and beautiful.

Amen.

A chill wind against an empty bottle,
one body embracing another,

the full circle of one sound
from a shared emptiness.

Hammer against anvil,
the desperate chord of a scream
unwitnessed in night,

the spark that makes them one.

The apple in autumn,
a child walking into a dark room,

a meteor silently falling,
closing around something hard,
opening out of something cold,

leaping out of windows,
                    dancing,
hands in the air

Amen

like you don’t care

Amen

every night not in the night.

Unearthing the Human Sigh

Every night new holes appear,
yet the world feels a little less hollow.

A candle is lit in a window, and a shadow emerges
from the common dark,
                              a small child
walking down a long hallway.

It’s a story we read before sleep.
A fable that stretches a little longer
                    with every utterance.

Once upon a time, a plane explodes in the air,
brilliant fireworks clamor to be seen.

Radiant colors of creation, desire, and passion
quickly shiver back into the universe.

Now is the time someone falls in love,
pretending those pills are just little seeds to swallow.

What she buries will clamber and cling
until all her hard surfaces cannot be seen.

Then she will climb over her body, out of the hole
she’s dug for herself.

Doctors undress her trying to find some name
she hasn’t taken with her,

something she’s left that will lead them back
to the first page of a diary,

the X they can dig up to find a treasure
they feel is always placed
                   in something empty.

A scar.
A tattoo from fire.

Every night the many names
soon to be dispersed come into being

and the world becomes
a little less hollow.

They can be heard from bridges or opened windows,
on the backs of old men,

from the breasts of women, between

two lovers trying to find the words
that can endure such nights, the words

that can fall
at the same speed and weight

as a human sigh
that knows no end.

Identity Theory

Matt Borondy, Publisher/Editor: I’m reading Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan, The Still Point of the Turning World by Emily Rapp, and I just finished A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.

Jullianne Ballou, Assistant Editor: I’m reading an advance copy of Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass, by Murphy Hicks Henry.

Robert Birnbaum, Editor-at-Large: I’m reading Wash by Margaret Wrinkle, How Literature Saved my Life by David Shields, In Partial Disgrace by Charles Newman, The Democracy Project by David Graeber, and Masaryk Station by David Downing. There are more, but I realize listing them is just showing off which I am not averse to but hey…

Hilarie Ashton, Assistant Editor: I’m reading Claire Bidwell Smith’s memoir of the deaths of her parents, The Rules of Inheritance – it’s helping me with the memoir I’m writing of my own mother, who died three months ago. I’m also reading Benoit Peeters’ Derrida, Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, Julia Alvarez’s De cómo las muchachas García perdieron el acento, and Nicholas Birns’ Theory After Theory.

James Warner, Fiction Editor: Currently reading Tom Piccirilli’s The Last Kind Words, Daniel Sada’s Almost Never, and Rob Davidson’s The Farther Shore.

For more, visit us on Goodreads.

Identity Theory

National Poetry Month has returned. We say, “Up with poetry!”

In the wide-open space below, otherwise known as the comments, feel free to contribute your original poetry, your favorite poet’s copyright-free verse, a link to a page of poetry you like, or any thoughts about poetry you wish to share.

(Alternatively, if you’re willing to wait a few months to see your verse online, you may submit your poetry for official publication in our journal.)

Note: We aren’t the lovely people in that photo. It’s a random image from Flickr.

Identity Theory

Sarah Crossland likes to write poems about dead people, holiness, roller coasters, and love. The recipient of the 2012 Boston Review Poetry Prize, she was invited to read at the Library of Congress in the spring of 2011, and her manuscript God Factory was a finalist in the 2012 Milkweed Editions Lindquist and Vennum Prize. In her spare time, she plays the harp and teaches at Oakhill Correctional Institute. Someday she hopes to keep bees.

What can people anticipate from your first book of poetry? Are there certain themes or structures that reoccur?

I’m not entirely sure which book will end up being The First One. I have one manuscript out at contests now, God Factory, and another that I’m wrapping up for my MFA thesis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is called Tomorrowland. Plus two in the proverbial stew—Brioullardeuse and 62 Short Films on Creation.

God Factory is a diptych of two longer poems, both of which investigate the idea that classic cinema created a pantheon of icons for everyday worship. The first poem in the book is a series of epistolary poems written by a contemporary Adam (of the Garden of Eden fame) to actress Grace Kelly, and the second is an abecedarian lyric explosion of the life of Sarah Bernhardt (which concerns themes like lying, spectacle, excess, and of course, God). Tomorrowland, on the other hand, is your standard 21 Singles book. There are some sci-fi poems, persona poems, poems about roller coasters and World’s Fairs and disaster and the sublime, love poems, childhood poems, poems that could be dreams—it’s a whole spice rack of themes, really. But, you know, there’s some follow-through metaphor in there about “when things get all blended together”…

The remaining two—62 Short Films on Creation and Brioullardeuse—both involve film, the divine, and ecstasy. The former is a series of miniature Surrealist screenplays (for which I got my inspiration from Tom Andrews), and the latter is a contemporary, hybrid-genre, feminist retelling of the MGM musical Brigadoon, which I hope will someday have actual music to go with it. So, it seems I have a lot of projects. I think it helps, though, to orchestrate it so they’re all at different stages at any given time. I used to write novels when I was younger, and it would just be an abyss when I finished—I’d have to start from scratch again. This way, I’m always thinking about the next thing while I’m polishing the latest thing. It helps a lot with that metaphysical terror.

Thinking of T.S. Eliot famous quip, “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity,” what aspects of writing your first book of poems make you feel most anxious and/or most creative?

What I find to be most anxiety-inducing is actually the concept of the book itself! I mean, the front and back covers that close it off, that say: this is the start, and this is the end. It’s hard for me to work that way—thinking of my writing as having these distinguishable bookends throughout time. In finishing up Tomorrowland, for instance, I worry that I have a dozen more World’s Fair poems in me. Then where do they go? I kind of want to write towards everything all going in one big pile—to go straight to the Collected Works. Even the longer projects that could be books in themselves. I know that’s not the way publishing works these days, particularly if I want to get a job, but I’m just hypersensitive to all of the interconnectedness among my poems. Charles Wright said something like, “A poet has only six poems to write.” Meaning that we write what we’re obsessed with. Maybe I’ll suddenly become obsessed with something else as I get older, but so far I’ve basically had the same exact interests since I was four. But I also find that totally empowering—it definitely feeds the creative behemoth. Once you get over that fact—these six poems—you can start digging into specific image and reimagining context.

What advice would you give to students who are just starting to write and publish poetry?

I cross stitch, so whenever I think of writing advice, I think of what I’d consider cross stitching into a decorative pillow (you know—like “Home Sweet Home” or “Live Love Laugh”—which are not my personal maxims, mind you). One of my high school writing teachers, Eric Hoefler, always told us “Pages in, pages out!” You read a lot, you’ll be able to write a lot. I think this is true for capturing inspiration, yes, but also in battling that dumb old saying, “Write what you know.” I hate that. Because you can begin to know about almost anything only by reading about it. Sure, you can’t know what Sarah Bernhardt was thinking when she leaped from the set parapet and injured her knee so badly she decided on amputation—but in reading about historical context, coupled with biography and autobiography, you can begin to take—ah—the leap. (Pun irresistible.)

I also tell my writing students to go big or go home. Yes, specific, sensory detail is important. Yes, realistic dialogue is great. But it needs to matter. You need to be taking risks. You need to be surprised, you need to be uncomfortable. I have a quote up on my wall from novelist Monica Wood that says, “If you’re going to jump, jump off a cliff, not a chair.” I currently work on the magazine Devil’s Lake, and we always try to publish pieces we deem “necessary.” If your writing’s not necessary, then why is it here? Why should anyone read it or begin to care?

Sylvia Plath is reputed to have said she loved rejection slips because they showed her she tried. How do you make art or sense out of the rejection involved in writing?

Sometimes I like to think of rejection as an initiation, a sort of hazing. Minus the velvet cloaks, kidnapping, and riddles (which is a shame, right?—I’d love to be kidnapped by McSweeney’s to, for instance, wind up blindfolded in an orange grove with a sestina written out on my arm, suddenly burdened with the task of figuring out what it all means). I don’t know if it ever really gets better, though—if the hazing actually ends. When I was at UVa, there was a legend going around that Greg Orr covered the walls of one of his bathrooms with all his rejection slips. So maybe you can get to the point where there’s a feng shui to it.

But, right now, I love rejection slips about as much as I love cleaning the onion bits out of the food trap in my kitchen sink. It’s no fun, but you have to keep doing it—and then once it’s over you have a clean drain again. Throughout the years I’ve heard a lot of token phrases about what failure is supposed to mean to writers. The one that I’ve always been drawn to most claims that writing is about trying to achieve lesser and lesser degrees of failure. I think John Casteen said that when he visited one of my undergrad workshops. But language is always (about) failure, isn’t it? In that Buddhist/linguist sort of way—a poem about a dog is not the dog himself. It’s that whole Hassian “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” When I make my poem-things, they’re always fractures because they can’t be the whole world. They can be miniatures, they can be mandalas centered in the self—or an imagined self—but they can’t be the whole universe because language doesn’t let us. Even with Whitmanesque cataloguing, even with thematic obsession, there’s still a sense that what has been done is artifice—not the thing itself, but a representation. Which, though beautiful, is still ultimately, in some way, failure.

What Peaches and What Penumbras, the anthology you edited of witty writerly grocery lists, takes its title from Ginsberg’s “The Supermarket in California.” Within this poem, he takes an imaginary walk with Walt Whitman. What poet would you most like to walk with and is there anything in particular you would like to chat about among “the brilliant stacks of cans?”

I’ll be totally honest here. I’d love to make out with John Keats in the wine and beer section of Trader Joe’s. Obviously, there would be very little talking. I think we’d have a good time.

As you look toward the future, are there any specific goals or aspirations you hope to attain in regards to writing?

In the very-soon-future (like this weekend), I’m hoping to start writing a narrative sequence poem about this breathtaking image that was up on themetapicture.com earlier this week—it’s a series of nice-ish dresses, all illuminated, hanging from a tree. It’s very Southern, lots of color saturation, and I want it to be inhabited with voices. And with this project, I’m thinking about utilizing Pinterest (gasp!) as a vehicle for organizing the inspirational images I want to cluster and converse together. Would Elizabeth Barrett Browning have done that? Well, maybe. Probably not. But I don’t really care. I think technology is only moderately evil, but so is vodka. And where would poets be without vodka? I think we all actually do need our sins.

Visit Sarah Crossland at SarahCrossland.com.

Identity Theory

Lucy is pregnant. She calls the clinic and makes an appointment for her fourth abortion. She is twenty-three.

*

The first: She is sixteen and gets pregnant on a mattress on a Wednesday afternoon. The boy is a year younger than her, and she has to talk him into it. It is a school day, and they have come to his parents’ house after eighth period. Walking through the door, she is affected by the tall ceilings and thick afternoon light streaming through the windows. The boy’s mother looks at her son and shakes her head with an indulgence that moves the girl, who likewise believes that he is better than his personality suggests. When the boy tells his mother that they are going to watch a movie in his room, she says to leave the door open. He takes Lucy’s hand as they walk up the stairs, and she feels like herself, only freer; she feels like a girl.

When they go into his room he shuts the door. The boy has taped blue and red blankets over his windows, and the room is darker than the rest of the house. The feeling of being hidden fills her with a golden joy, and she doesn’t miss the sunlight. There is a mattress in the far corner of the room; the sheets are wrinkled and navy blue. The room is a mess; she likes that too. There are boxers and tennis shoes and diving trophies and lighters and crumpled gum wrappers and empty prescription bottles and bent hangers on the floor, desk, table, and chair. She lies down on the mattress, mimicking the movements of her parents’ housecat. He puts a on a DVD—Queen of the Damned—and lies down beside her. She feels bright like the sun in that split second before an eclipse. They start to kiss; his hand, trembling, stops when he realizes how wet she is. She squeezes her thighs together and he reacts.

They undress. He asks her to “suck on it.” She says they should have sex (it’ll be years before she calls it “fucking”), but he repeats his request for a blowjob. He is a virgin and knows she isn’t. She’s been having sex for two years, but has avoided blowjobs ever since the time she was thirteen and a guy told her that it turned him on to see how ugly she looked with his dick in her mouth. She pulls the boy on top of her and guides his penis into her. The moment before entry, he says “please.” She never forgets this.

She doesn’t tell him when she finds out she is pregnant. Her friend, a tense, petite blonde girl, drives her to the Planned Parenthood on Beach Boulevard. On the drive, they smoke a joint and listen to a CD featuring a woman with a guitar and a strident voice. Her friend kisses her on the cheek before she goes in, then stays in the car, burning her fingers on the end of the joint. Inside, Lucy signs in with the woman at the front desk and pays $425. A friend’s mother gave her the money. She has decided to take mifepristone, the abortion pill; the word “surgical” disturbs her.

Lucy and her friend have had a long discussion about the merits of the pill versus the surgical procedure. The phrase “less invasive” has come up at least ten times. They are both secretly proud of using the word “invasive” so casually. Plus their recent feminist education has imbued anything “invasive” with an air of rape. They both agree that letting a male doctor (how could he not be?) vacuum the zygote out of her would be somehow less woman-positive than self-inducing a miscarriage in her bedroom while her dad is at work and her mom is at the town center Christmas shopping.

A nurse takes Lucy to a private room and explains how to take the pills, warning of the inevitable cramping. When they get back to Lucy’s house, her friend leaves for an unexpected family dinner. Lucy goes upstairs, turns on the television, and takes the first pill. The next eight hours pass filled with a pain that Lucy didn’t know hours could hold. She feels as though a hand covered in ground glass is holding on to her uterus, digging its nails in and squeezing. Between bouts of throwing up in the bathroom, she lies in the fetal position on her bed beneath a large poster of Johnny Depp smoking a cigarette while playing piano, and bleeds, and prays to a God she hasn’t believed in for years. After a while she feels like crying, but the pain persists.

When it is over she feels exhausted in a way that is almost beautiful, like the battered feeling of swimming in an ocean only hours before a hurricane.

*

The second: Lucy is nineteen and in love for the first time. She has brought her boyfriend—a long, lanky boy with Arabic features and uneven dreadlocks—home with her from college. During dinner Lucy sits next to the same friend who drove her to the clinic years ago. The girl now lives with her boyfriend, who is thirty and has a condo on the beach. Lucy and her friend drink a lot of red wine during the meal, feeling very adult with their men and their dinner-party dresses. Lucy’s friend becomes very drunk and laughs loudly at everything she says, which appears to embarrass the boyfriend, who seems sober despite having drunk more than the rest of them. In a fit of laughter, her friend reveals that Lucy has read her boyfriend’s diary and is suspicious of his friendship with a girl who lives in their dorm. Lucy is mortified and her boyfriend spills his wine, breaking the glass and staining the cream carpet beneath the table. They leave quickly and climb into the parked car.

Her boyfriend moves his hand up her leg from his place in the driver’s seat, and Lucy immediately pulls off her underwear and climbs over to sit on top of him, facing away from him. He seems surprised but unzips his pants and pulls her down onto him. She holds on to the latch on the roof and lets him set the pace of their fucking, which is faster than she would prefer. He pulls her down and moans, kissing her neck, and apologizes for coming so quickly. Lucy is only concerned with the diary revelation and moves back to the passenger seat, hoping he is tipsy and distracted enough to forget about it. They head back to her parents’ house with the windows down, careful to drive the speed limit. This is the first time they haven’t used a condom.

Nearly two months later, they are driving to the abortion clinic together. Lucy has known about the pregnancy for over a month, but had to wait six weeks to let the fetus develop; it needs to be visible on the sonogram for the surgical procedure. Lucy has weighed her options and decided she would rather tolerate morning sickness and sore tits for a few more weeks if it means five minutes of pain as opposed to eight hours—invasiveness be damned.

In the waiting room she makes jokes with her boyfriend about the other couples there: the visible discomfort of the boys, hands flat on their jeans and eyes on the floor, and the inescapable misery of the girls. When she is called back, Lucy’s boyfriend touches her arm and says, “Good luck.” This makes her laugh a little too hard; she feels giddy and unreal. A nurse takes her into a small room where she changes into a blue paper gown. The woman pricks her finger and gives her some pills, then takes her blood pressure. Darkness creeps inward from the edges of her vision, and the girl feels lightheaded. She asks if the pills are supposed to have this effect, and the nurse says no. Lucy tells her calmly that she is blacking out.

The nurse, a large white woman with giant breasts, puts her arm around Lucy and leans her back on the bench, fanning the girl’s face with her clipboard. She rubs her fingers over Lucy’s forehead and squeezes her earlobes. Lucy is conscious, but everything in front of her is black.

“It’s alright, sweetie,” the nurse says in a different voice than she’d been using previously.

Gradually Lucy’s vision returns and she drinks water out of a paper cup while being led to a different room, where girls sit on couches wearing the same paper gowns. For the next hour Lucy talks and listens to the girls who want to talk or be listened to. One girl is fifteen and swears she’s never skipped a birth control pill. Another woman already has four kids and says she loves them but can’t afford another. There is a Mexican girl who doesn’t speak much English and cries on Lucy’s shoulder. Lucy tells her she looks pretty when she cries and repeats it until the girl understands and laughs. There is a black girl who sits on the edge of the couch looking at the wall and won’t respond to any questions. One by one they are called away until only Lucy and the silent girl remain.

She thinks about the other girls and decides she loves them. She does not think about her boyfriend in the waiting room. She does not think about the boy in high school or the Johnny Depp poster. The nurse calls her name, and she is taken into a surgical room where she lies back on a table and puts her feet up in stirrups. They cover her mouth to put her under twilight, which Lucy has read will not obscure the pain but will cause her to immediately lose her memory of it. (Later, all she remembers is one moment when she thought, but did not feel, that she could feel everything, and she squeezed a nurse’s hand.)

She wakes up in the recovery room to the sound of the fifteen-year-old girl crying in the bed beside her. She puts on the clothes she brought with her—pajamas and her favorite rainbow-star socks—and is led out the back entrance, where her boyfriend waits in the car. He smiles at her when she gets in and asks her how she feels. She says “blurry.” He asks her to repeat herself. She doesn’t.

As they drive home, they listen to a book on tape about dragons and smoke a blunt he rolled during her surgery. She feels weak and happy and wants the drive to last forever.

*

Last time: Lucy doesn’t know when she got pregnant. Barely a year after the second abortion, she and the same boyfriend have been living in a house with two other couples. They often move toward each other in the morning, fucking on the bright sheets while she looks at the parsley growing in the flower box in the window over the bed. The sunlight refracts through crystals resting on the windowsill: kyanite, malachite, spirit quartz. She doesn’t love her boyfriend anymore, and it only makes him want her more.

Not knowing what to do about it, she fucks him in the mornings to feel like a decent girlfriend, then leaves to read in a secret park on Chalmers Street. Only tourists go there, and she never has to worry about seeing anyone. What did she read the morning she got pregnant?

Her boyfriend is not there for this abortion; he is studying lemurs in the rainforest in Madagascar and cannot be reached by phone or computer. When she told him on the phone a week before he left that she was pregnant, she didn’t know what response she wanted. She acted tough and made a joke about it being old hat, just another trip to the chopping block. Then she waited every morning for the next seven days for him to show up on her doorstep. Now she is driving to an old friend’s house to take the abortion pill in their bedroom, even though her friend is out of town. She cannot wait alone again through those six weeks of feeling full of something terrible and lovely; she has chosen the agony instead.

She climbs through the window and walks through the quiet house; she has always loved quiet houses. She gets a glass of water in the kitchen, then looks through a stack of DVDs in the living room. She goes back to the bedroom, puts on the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, takes the pill, and lies down.

It is as bad as she remembers. Afterward she feels empty.

*

This time: It’s been three years since the third abortion, and Lucy meets a man in a coffee shop during the summer. They spend all their time drinking coffee and reading and watching movies and smoking cigarettes. She is in love by September, and is pregnant by the first snowfall.

When the test reads positive, he is in the room with her. Lucy’s first thought is how young the expression on his face makes him look. How childlike. Looking at him, Lucy feels a hundred years old.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll get an abortion.”

*

Lucy doesn’t think much about whether she is a good or bad person. She’s not afraid to think about it, she’s just not sure it matters. She feels full of something ineffable. She is in love. She is nauseous. She is horny. She doubts. She smokes cigarettes. She wonders what the baby would look like. She counts the days until her six weeks are up. She dreams about putting red lipstick on a little girl with brown hair. She dreams about having sex with an octopus, like in Hokusai’s The Dream of a Fisherman’s Wife. She makes the appointment. She throws up outside a coffee shop. She colors a seal violet and blue in a coloring book. She doubts. She reads a poem. She wonders about herself, and draws no conclusions.

Image by Pink Sherbet.

Identity Theory

Caitlin Doyle is a poet whose recent honors include the Amy Award in Poetry through Poets & Writers Magazine, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in poetry through the Sewanee Writers Conference, the 2012 ALSCW Fellowship (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers) to the Vermont Studio Center and a Literary Grant in Poetry through the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in several publications, including The Atlantic, The Threepenny Review, Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, Measure, Best New Poets 2009 and The Warwick Review. She also has a professional background in film and screenwriting, having written and directed short films shown at various festivals. Ms. Doyle is currently at work toward the completion of her first book-length poetry manuscript.

Your poetry, perhaps in contrast to the prevalence of free verse in contemporary poetry, has been recognized for its skillful use of formal elements like rhyme and meter. Besides the musical quality derived from rhyme and meter, are there other reasons why you find yourself drawn to formalism? What would you say to claims that either one of those approaches, free verse or formal poetry, is aesthetically superior to the other?

Yes, there are reasons beyond musicality that draw me toward the traditional technical elements of poetry. After all, rhyme and meter don’t have an inherently larger claim on the power to produce sonorous language than any of the other tools available to a poet. Poets writing both “formal poetry” and “free verse” have so many ways beyond metrical patterning and the pairing of rhyme-words to make a poem sing. Examples include alliteration, assonance, the rhythmical interplay of syntax and line-length, and the resonant blending of varied diction registers. I put the phrases “formal poetry” and “free verse” in quotation marks because, though they serve as terminology to make a general distinction between two kinds of aesthetic approaches, I share the belief of many poets that the terms lack sufficient nuance. The best “free verse” possesses formal limitations and guiding principles, just as the most gripping “formal poetry” contains freedom and innovation.

Making the claim that one aesthetic approach in poetry is inherently superior to another is like arguing that one instrument in an orchestra produces better music than all of the other instruments. To argue that, objectively speaking, a violin creates a greater sound than a viola or a cello is to leave out a key consideration: the subjective reality of who is playing the instrument and how he or she is doing it. Much like any structural feature of written language, such as syntax or meter, an instrument is an inanimate tool, possessing no intrinsic degree of value until somebody engages with it. What determines the quality of the music isn’t the instrument but the way that it is put to use in the hands of a specific individual.

There’s a quote by the poet Donald Hall that strikes me as providing an illuminating framework for this discussion: “The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.” A rondeau is a received poetic form with strict structural requirements that dictate the division of stanzas, the number of syllables per line, and the arrangement of rhymes, among other things. What I admire about this quote is that Hall doesn’t simply say “the form of free verse is as binding as the form of a rondeau.” In other words, he doesn’t just make the point that free verse possesses formal principles. He also ventures that free verse is “as liberating as the form of a rondeau,” which could seem like a surprising statement when one considers that a form as stringent as the rondeau does not appear, on the surface, to qualify as “liberating.” With this assertion, he acknowledges the sense of unrestricted license that can come from writing within tightly established boundaries, the freedom that can be found when one allows form to lead a poem’s content in unexpected directions. Essentially, Hall’s quote highlights the way that all good poetry, whether free verse or poetry that uses traditional formal elements, relies on the tension between limitation and liberation.

Your free verse is just as skilled as your formal work. I’m thinking particularly of your highly memorable “Self-Portrait With Monkeys” (The Threepenny Review) and your playful and haunting poem “If Siegfried And Roy Had Never Met” (Black Warrior Review). Do you find that your process and your thematic tendencies differ in relation to whether you’re writing free verse or formal poetry? As a second part of this question, can you talk about how you came to develop your attraction to formal verse in the context of today’s free-verse-dominant contemporary poetry world?

Whether I’m composing a free verse poem or a piece containing traditional formal elements, my process is very similar. My goal is to find a balance between artistic control and openness to the unknown, guiding the language toward my desired effects while also allowing the piece to take on its own agency. I love the way that structure and content can pull against each other with a tension that ends up taking both in unexpected directions, an experience that’s central to my working methods. I feel most successful as a poet when my final product is something I could not have foreseen yet still contains a sense of the core emotional impetus that first set my pen into motion.

When it comes to thematic tendencies in both my free verse and my work that possesses formal properties, I am frequently driven by subject matter surrounding the spaces left in human life by a wounding, a lack, a loss, or a sense of incompletion. Writing about such spaces in my own experience and in the lives of others, frequently the lives of well-known public figures, galvanizes my pen. I am interested in exploring the role of both lyric and narrative impulses in reaching toward filling those spaces.

To answer the second part of your question, I’ve never felt that there was a moment in which I consciously chose to possess an interest in the traditional formal features of poetry. As a writer, you are shaped by what you read, and as a human being, you mostly choose to read what attracts you, a process of selection that isn’t always explicable or definable. I’ve found that a writer’s aesthetic leanings are often as unaccountable as any other inclination in an individual’s life, springing as much from natural disposition as from other motivating factors. Why does someone choose the red bike in the shop instead of the yellow one? Why does someone listen to a certain radio channel in lieu of different options?

I’ve been drawn to the traditional formal elements of poetry since early childhood, having started out my reading life with rhyme-rich poets like Christina Rossetti, A.E. Housman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Edgar Allan Poe. I felt hypnotized by the way these writers used traditional formal elements to combine regularity and surprise, to create a dynamic interplay of repetition and variation, setting up my ear for expectations that sometimes met with fulfillment and other times met with unpredictable subversions. Of course, back then, I couldn’t have articulated such effects with absolute clarity, but I sensed their great power.

Your creative background includes work in film, with your short films having been shown in a variety of festivals. I am interested in the fact that you’ve taught poetry classes that incorporate aspects of film into the curriculum; most recently, as the Emerging Writer Resident at Penn State University, you taught a course that incorporated screenwriting and poetry. Can you talk about the experience of teaching the two genres together? Is there a particular piece of cinema that you find useful when it comes to teaching students about the role of imagery in poetry?

I relished the opportunity to design and teach a course focused specifically on poetry and screenwriting at Penn State because I’ve always felt that the two genres illuminate each other in a vivid manner. Since students tend to have much more experience with watching movies than with reading poems, I’ve discovered that using film as a doorway to poetry allows students to enter the rigors of finely tuned language in a way that feels exhilarating to them. Film provides a particularly strong resource when it comes to teaching students about the centrality of imagery in poetry, highlighting the way that poets often use images as their primary method of conveying meaning and evoking responses in the minds and hearts of readers. Ezra Pound’s notion of the image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instance of time” really comes alive for students when they watch a segment of film that creates its narrative, emotional, and tonal effects primarily through the accumulation and juxtaposition of carefully chosen images.

When it comes to identifying a piece of cinema that’s particularly useful as a lens through which to discuss the role of imagery in poetry, I find a brief three-image silent sequence in Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M to be very effective. Leading up to the segment, Lang spends the movie’s initial scenes building tension around the fact that a young child name Elsie has not come home at the regular time after school. The child’s mother grows increasingly nervous as the hours pass. We watch as Elsie, who has been walking down the street bouncing a ball, meets a strange man who complements her ball and buys her a balloon. Then the silent sequence begins, featuring the following three images in succession: a shot of an empty dinner plate on the table set by Elsie’s mother, a shot of Elsie’s ball rolling out of the bushes and slowing to a stop, and a shot of Elsie’s balloon, which has floated out of her hands, becoming ensnared in a power line.

I emphasize for poetry students the way that Lang doesn’t choose to directly show the stranger abducting the child but instead evokes that fact through a series of ominous and charged images that make the abduction all the more affecting for viewers. We ascertain through just a few haunting images both the narrative reality of what has happened and the emotional tenor of the event. I’ve found that students better understand the way that imagery functions in poetry after watching this excerpt from M.

Though I tend to view the ever-common “show-don’t-tell” Creative Writing dictum as overly limiting because many of the best poems tell as well as show, I do think the basic idea of “showing” rather than “telling” is an important one for beginning poets to assimilate. To that end, film provides a marvelous vehicle for helping a student grasp how to enact ideas, emotions, and experiences rather than explaining them.

There are a lot of debates about how to properly teach prosody, which is the study of versification (particularly of metrical structure). In fact, it is common today for most students of English and Creative Writing to go through their entire schooling without learning prosody. Can you talk a little bit about your own education in prosody and give some thoughts on how you think it might be most effectively taught?

None of my most memorable teachers of English or Creative Writing taught prosody with a handbook full of rules and metrical terms. The best teachers I had rarely said the words “trochee, “dactyl,” “catalexis,” or “amphribach.” Rather, they emphasized the power of rhyme, meter, and received forms by the direct act of exposing us to superlative poems that engage traditional formal elements. I ascertained way more about the skillful use of rhyme and meter by having to read, memorize, and recite Thomas Hardy poems for Derek Walcott’s class in graduate school than if I had taken a course that focused on versification terminology and scansion exercises.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that young poets shouldn’t learn how to scan poems and how to recognize and use the proper metrical terms. They certainly should take it upon themselves to do so, either by seeking out a class or mentor that can offer that kind of technical training or by learning the material in a self-taught way with the help of some good prosody guides (Alfred Corn’s “The Poem’s Heartbeat” is a particularly useful text in that regard). But I think that, when it comes to assimilating the principles of prosody, it’s ultimately more useful for students to focus on actual poems than on other forms of instruction. The approach of my best literature and writing teachers in high school, college, and beyond seemed to confirm what my own early reading experiences had suggested: the most effective and enjoyable way to gain an education in poetry’s craft components is to absorb them directly through immersion in the works of powerful poets.

In other words, if you want to develop the ability to engage poetry’s traditional formal heritage with skill, I think that your best bet is to learn from the inside out, through inhabiting the words of those with true formal mastery – letting the rhythms of their language enter your mind, heart, and body – rather than trying to learn from the outside in via instructional materials. The important thing is not that you can read Yeats’ Among Schoolchildren and say “he’s writing ottava rima stanzas, combining strict iambic pentameter with instances of significant metrical variation, and employing a mixture of enjambment and end-stopped lines.” What matters is that you can feel the effects of his technical decisions resonating in your core. What matters is that you can register in a visceral way how the poem’s formal features embody the tension between unity and disunity in human life – and that you can absorb from him a sense of how you might use traditional formal properties of poetic language to shape your readers’ sensory experience of a poem.

In American Creative Writers on Class, your poem “Paris,” which wonderfully considers Paris Hilton’s European codified first name pared with the commodification of her surname, seems to suggest that we all take a closer look at the issue of inheritance and privilege. In reference to class and poetry, what interests you or upsets you in the world of writing and teaching poetry?

When it comes to class issues in the world of poetry, what most occupies my attention these days is the financial situation surrounding adjunct professorship. A large number of emerging poets pay the bills by holding adjunct positions, usually teaching English Composition classes or Creative Writing courses. More often than not, these sorts of positions entail an over packed schedule, abysmal pay, zero health benefits, and the absence of a voice in university matters. It’s not uncommon for adjuncts to teach more than a full-time load, spread out at multiple campuses, and still barely earn a living wage. Considering that adjuncts in all fields comprise the majority of university faculty in this country, the lack of institutional respect offered to them, financial and otherwise, is an upsetting reality. In order to become competitive for tenure-track opportunities, emerging poets who work as adjuncts must garner notable magazine publications and produce books, yet their teaching and grading load is often so large that they can’t find the time and energy for creative production.

It distresses me to think of how many gifted writers in the emerging stages find themselves continually stunted by this system. Their status as members of an over worked and poorly compensated academic underclass results in an impoverishment of higher education and also potentially of the nation’s literature. I don’t mean to overdramatize the situation. Adjunct professorship is just one of many difficult financial circumstances impacting young people who choose to devote their lives to writing and it only pertains to those pursing an academic career track. Of course, it has been difficult for most writers throughout history to balance making creative work with paying the bills, and when it comes to the pursuit of artistic expression, many people have lived in far more limiting conditions than those faced by today’s typical emerging-writer-adjunct-professor. But nonetheless, given the large number of brilliant young writers currently holding adjunct positions, whether in the hope of long term tenure-track prospects or just because of an immediate need to cover living expenses, it’s hard not to feel that the circumstances of adjunct professorship comprise an important point of concern in the poetry world.

Thinking of T.S. Eliot’s famous quip, “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity,” what aspects of writing your first book of poems make you feel most anxious?

My answer to this question is related to your inquiry about class issues in the poetry world. What makes me most anxious as I shape my first book is the fact that, as far as job prospects in the literary realm, there’s a considerable amount of incentive for an emerging poet to put out a full-length collection as quickly as he or she can manage it. Having a published book is particularly important when it comes to finding a university teaching position that offers financial security and the chance of tenure-track advancement. As a result, young poets sometimes end up rushing out their first books in order to achieve a sense of professional stability, later regretting significant quantities of the work they included in their debut collections. It can be very self-limiting to subject artistic maturation to an artificial chronology.

I worry about the ways that the current structure of the professional market in the poetry world can hamper the gradual and laborious development of a poet’s particular set of gifts. What would have happened if Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens, who published their first books at thirty-nine and forty-three successively, had not allowed their work to progress at its own pace?

It’s important to me that I resist the often very compelling professional and financial temptations to publish one’s first book quickly. I feel it’s essential that I produce the collection according to my own internal timeline, respecting the fact that I’m not a particularly fast writer. Poems take shape slowly for me. What matters to me is not that the book comes out a year from now as opposed to three years down the line. The crucial thing is that I feel confident about the manuscript having reached its fullest fruition before I seek publication for it. Of course, it can be just as damaging to hold off on publishing a collection because of pressing one’s work up against unrealistic expectations, waiting until every poem meets some standard of unattainable perfection. There’s no such thing as an absolutely flawless book of poetry. So, for me, the goal is to find the balance between bringing the manuscript to as complete a realization as possible while also knowing when to say “it’s time to let go and release this into the world.”

Identity Theory