#20 - Jennifer Chang

How often had you sent out The History of Anonymity before it was chosen as a selection for the VQR Poetry Series?

I had been sending it out from 2002 to 2006, though it had only been in its final and current form for the last two years. I never sent to more than a handful of contests (Whitman, Bakeless, Yale, Sarabande, Alice James, and occasionally others if the judge was “appropriate”) and I sent it directly to a few publishers (Graywolf, Wesleyan, California). I think it’s worth it to be both picky and patient: I wanted the best publisher for my book, I wanted to see the book in bookstores, and I didn’t want to rush myself or my poems. (All these wishes, I’m happy to say, came true.) When Ted Genoways, the series editor, contacted me in spring 2007, he told me that it could take several years for the book to come out. I told him that I was in no hurry—what was another three or four years? I’m still shocked and extremely honored that The History of Anonymity was among the books chosen to inaugurate the series.

What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?

The book was originally dominated by the lyric sequence "A Move to Unction," which had also been the original title. This poem overwhelmed the manuscript and the shorter lyrics somehow couldn’t meet its psychological challenges; they didn’t quite match its tenor or tone. So I struggled through many versions (and writing many more poems) trying to balance “A Move to Unction” and the shorter lyrics.

I’d always thought that the lyric sequence “The History of Anonymity” would be for a second book, but Phillis Levin pointed out to me that it would balance the manuscript out and that it would open all the poems to more a metaphysical inquiry. She was absolutely right. Now “The History of Anonymity” opens (and titles) the book and the short lyrics section act as a fulcrum between it and “A Move to Unction,” which concludes the book.

I left out—threw out!—nearly thirty poems in the process of assembling the book. Many of these exist only in my MFA thesis or are hiding in an “RIP” folder on my hard drive, and I doubt they’ll ever find second lives in any future manuscripts.

How much work did you do as far as editing the poems from the day you knew the book was accepted for publication to the day the book was in its final proofing stage?

I struggled about deciding whether or not to include the poem, “Obedience, or A Lying Tale,” which I’ll discuss in more detail on Brian Brodeur’s wonderful site How a Poem Happens. Ultimately, I kept this poem. I also revised “those who speak most say nothing.” into quatrains; it had been in stanzas of irregular lengths. I thought about leaving this poem out, too. I’ll be first to admit that it doesn’t quite fit—it’s the oldest poem in the book and it’s the only one in the book that I wrote while still in the MFA workshop at UVA. But I kept it in for private, sentimental reasons. I kept it for myself and I’ve never read it in public.

You mentioned a few weeks ago that sometimes it takes you months to write just one poem. Was this the case for most of the book, or just the longer poems and sequences? And are there poems that are written surprisingly quickly after working so hard on certain others?

My poems often emerge from a question that I cannot answer, a question that troubles me into artistic activity. If I write or think slowly, it’s because I’m working through a process of inquiry and discovery takes time. The poems don’t represent resolution or solution, but a measure of time and thought, a meditation in language and music. All this takes time and time is an especially scarce commodity for poets, who can’t make a living from their craft but must work and live in a too-often unpoetic world.

The title poem took years. I was living in San Francisco and I was keeping a journal more assiduously than usual. I was having trouble writing complete poems, so I was gathering ideas, observations, fragments of poetry, found quotations, and questions. That was nearly two years of gathering. Then my husband and I moved to Brooklyn; soon after I was awarded a residency at Djerassi, an artists’ colony in northern California. During my first week in residence, I was able to piece together the fragments into “The History of Anonymity.” I think it helped to leave and then return to that landscape, which had inspired the fragments in the first place. I had known that many of them had been of a piece, but I hadn’t known how to construct them into a coherent poem, though the poem ultimately resists coherence.

Drafts of the short lyrics generally do take less time, but I can be a very obsessive reviser. For example, I wrote “Pastoral” very quickly for a workshop at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, but then spent months revising and refining it to its final form. Granted, I don’t revise a poem day after day—I need to let the draft rest, to allow myself distance from it—so I’d come back to it whenever I was between poems or particularly troubled by a draft’s unfinishedness. More important, even though I love and need to write, it’s not always easy for me to write, so I’m also writing against inevitable obstacles (self-doubt; conceptual, linguistic, and emotional difficulties; life’s ten thousand distractions; etc.) that make me not want to write. Nothing makes me want to write less than a bad writing day. Oddly enough, “Apologia pro Vita Sua,” though a longer poem than “Pastoral,” took a morning and afternoon to write because I was, in a sense, ripe for that poem. I needed to get through that line of inquiry quickly: I needed to understand a specific loss, which at that time felt too strong to ignore. That’s a sad poem, but it was a good writing day.

What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?

I’m a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Virginia. I remember coming home from a stressful day at school—I was doing coursework and teaching—and finding a small package on my doormat. I had no idea what it was. I opened it: it was a single copy of my book. It was mid-January. The book wasn’t supposed to come out until April and I hadn’t heard from the publisher since turning in my final proofs. I was not expecting the book at all. I was so stressed out from school—I was working on a monstrous essay on Yeats that was overdue and that I couldn’t finish—and seeing the book somehow stressed me out more. I felt utterly nauseous. I slipped it into a stack of papers in my office. This sounds crazy unless you understand how frantic balancing coursework and teaching can be, but I kept forgetting about the book and then I’d stumbled upon it in that stack of papers and I’d feel nauseous all over again. Of course, I was very happy about the book, but at the time I was more terrified that I’d never finish that Yeats essay. (I finally did two months later.)

Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices?

I had suggested the spring painting from Cy Twombly’s Quattro Stagione (Four Seasons). I wanted an abstract representation of nature. They did a version of Primavera, but it didn’t look right. We didn’t even discuss it—I think we all knew it wasn’t right—and days later they gave me three new cover choices. All of them were marvelous and demonstrated how sensitively the designers had read the book. I hadn’t expected this. It was humbling and, at the same time, deeply satisfying—to be read and “seen” as I’d hoped to be. It further affirmed the rightness of the VQR Poetry Series for The History of Anonymity. I love the cover. I think it perfectly captures the mythical and philosophical inflections of the poems. And I love that it’s an actual place. It’s a photograph of a beach in Iceland. My husband found this out after some Internet sleuthing.

Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?

No. I mostly hoped it wouldn’t give me a big head or embarrass me or my family.

How has your life been different since your book came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?

I have a lot more Facebook friends. (Like you!)

Poets whom I admire have told me they admired my book. That was a big surprise. I got a really thoughtful review by Shara Lessley in Gulf Coast and another one by Kristina Marie Darling in Boston Review, both of these surprised me. I don’t know either of these women, but it means a lot to me to have such intelligent and insightful readers and, as an occasional reviewer, I know how much work can go into even the shortest review, making their particular attention all the more meaningful.

I didn’t expect anything to happen, so any attention has been lovely and surprising.

What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?

I lucked out. I did very little on my own, but many opportunities opened up and many generous friends helped out or invited me to read and I said “yes” to all that I could fit into my schedule. University of Georgia Press and VQR organized a book signing at AWP in NYC and readings in NYC and VA. Joseph Legaspi, whose first book Imago came out a few months before mine, asked me, and other Asian American poets with recent books, to read with him at NYU. Matthew Ohlzmann asked Gaby Calvocoressi to read at the Inside Out Literary Arts Project in Detroit and she asked him if I could read with her. The excellent Ed Skoog invited me and my friend and series mate, Cecily Parks, to read at Idyllwild Arts Academy in southern California, and then her friends Lytton Smith and Tom Haushalter helped us arrange a mini-tour from LA to SF. That was fun—we rented a hybrid SUV and Cecily drove up some steep cliffs as I held my breath. My husband, Aaron Baker, whose book Mission Work was published at the same time, was asked to read at Malaprops Bookstore in Asheville, NC and he suggested me as a co-reader. (I don’t mean to name-drop; I’m just trying to give credit to instrumental generosities.) As I said, I lucked out, mostly because many friends, with whom I’d agonized over manuscripts and lost contests for years, got their books taken around the same time as mine. It was a year of celebration, of visits and travels with friends I’d grown up with in poetry. I had at least one reading a month in 2008, the year my book came out, and nearly every reading derived from one of these friendships. Nearly every reading began as an opportunity to meet up with a good friend. This made the readings especially happy occasions.

What advice did you get before your first book came out?

The best advice I got was from Timothy Donnelly. I knew him through writing for Boston Review, though I had never really met or talked to him in person. A couple months after my book was taken, I ran into him in New York and he told me to enjoy the time before the book came out. He said it very eloquently and poignantly, which I can’t approximate though I remember being startled into attentiveness. He said that to be “about to be a first-book poet” was ephemeral and precious and that it was an excitement for the unknown that I wouldn’t experience again. He advised me to be mindful. I’ve butchered what he said, but it made a profound impression on me. He was right. That was a great time, and following his advice, I’d often pause and reflect on the moment and become filled with gratitude and excitement for what I did not yet have or know. If I hadn’t gotten that advice I would’ve wasted a lot of time stressing out about unwritten essays and unpaid bills.

But before I knew the book would ever come out, the advice that I gave myself, the advice I give to everyone, is to be patient. No one likes to hear this—often I didn’t/don’t like to hear this—but art takes time, poems take time, and nothing matters as much as the work itself. I realize that everyone knows this, but it can be so excruciatingly hard to be patient in the face of rejection and in the brouhaha that is “po-biz.” All that stuff is nerve-racking, but it’s also entirely circumstantial. One’s first book of poems should be worthy of one’s love of poetry, and, in my opinion, that can’t be rushed.

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

Yes!

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Jennifer Chang, author of The History of Anonymity, has published poems in A Public Space, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Poetry Daily. Her book reviews have appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and she’s received recent fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Virginia Commission for the Arts. A Ph.D. candidate in English at UVA, she is writing a dissertation on race and the modernist pastoral.

• Buy The History of Anonymity at Amazon
• Read "Pastoral" at The Academy of American Poets
  
• Read three poems in Blackbird
• Read "Slept" at Poetry Daily
• Read another interview at Small Press Spotlight
  

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#19 - Dan Albergotti

In a recent section in Poets & Writers, Debut Poets, you are one of the featured poets. I’m going to try and ask some questions dealing with some answers from that article. How often had you sent out The Boatloads before it was chosen as the winner of the A. Poulin Poetry Prize? It says you spent eight years writing the book. Was this the last eight years, or had you been writing the book before that without knowing it? I could also ask: Did any of The Boatloads come from your MFA thesis?

It was pretty much the last eight years, at least in terms of writing the actual poems that appear in The Boatloads. But from another perspective, you could say that I’d been “writing the book” for much, much longer. I’m sure I’ve been obsessively thinking about the ideas and themes of these poems for more than half my life. A lot of the poems in the book did appear in my MFA thesis, but that collection has, as you might expect, a much less unified vision.

What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?

I would tinker with small things here and there each year, but it went through a major overhaul only once: in the fall of 2004. The previous summer, I was a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and one of that year’s fellows, Sarah Manguso, very generously offered to read my manuscript and give me feedback. I remember being shocked when she mailed back the manuscript with some nice comments, but also with the recommendation that I cut over one-third of its poems. It was a little like cold water in the face, but I needed that kind of jolt to see that I had become complacent, not thoroughly scrutinizing the collection as a whole and leaving some older poems in as “filler.” I took Sarah’s advice and completely overhauled the manuscript. And you know, I’m not sure that I ever thanked enough for her suggestions, and I haven’t seen her in years. So thank you, Sarah Manguso, wherever you are.

What about the publication of the actual poems prior to the book being published? Many, if not all, have been previously published. Was there a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript?

I can understand where the question comes from, but really, I was never concerned about that at all. The sad truth is that poems published in literary journals reach very few eyes. From the writer’s perspective, you might think that you’ve already given all the poems in the book to the world. But once you get past your own ego, you have to acknowledge that the world wasn’t paying very much attention when those poems first appeared! It’s kind of funny to me when I hear people talk about poems in the book as if they’re new discoveries when those poems have appeared in literary journals with fairly broad distributions (and sometimes reprinted on websites with much wider reaches). I feel like those poems have already been out there, but “out there” is a very small stage, indeed.

How much work did you do as far as editing the poems from the day you knew the book won to the day the book was in its final proofing stage?

I was incredibly lucky to be able to publish my book with BOA Editions. The people there are just the best. When I won the prize, I thought the book was finished, that there would be very little editing left to do. But a couple of months later, I got a long list of queries from BOA’s Peter Conners. His questions were challenging and revealed that he had read the manuscript with extraordinary care. They forced me to reexamine some poems that I had considered “finished” and led to some fine polishing that made a great deal of difference in the end. I should note, also, that Peter’s query letter ended with a reassurance that I had the absolute final say on any changes, so there was no undue pressure applied from the publisher. It was just an incredibly helpful, and necessary, gesture on BOA’s part. In the end, I didn’t make all of the suggested changes, but those that I did make were very, very important, and I’m grateful every day that my book wasn’t ferried into the world by a publishing house that takes an extremely casual approach to manuscript queries.

The notion of God is one of the themes running through many of these poems in very different ways. And what I admire about many of these poems is the different way the looming presence of God can become comic, serious, playful, and take on so many different guises, sometimes all at once. Was this an idea you had from the beginning when writing the book, or was there a need for this variation as it developed over the years?

The varieties of treatment are not anything I’ve ever thought about consciously. I’ve been wrestling with the idea of God since at least the age of 12. It’s something that’s so deeply embedded in who I am that my thoughts on it arise to consciousness imperceptibly. Keats says that “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” That’s how this theme comes to my poems—it’s just an organic part of me and my work.

I look at poems like “Song 246” and “The Safe World” and how they’re balanced with poems like “Among the Things He Does Not Deserve” and “A Prayer for My Daughter, Who Does Not Exist.” There seems to be a great concern for the celebration of life and safety, and the blessings of what we have this moment, but there also seems to be warnings of possible tragedy, sometimes imminent, present within some of these poems and how they’re put together in each section. Was this something you strived for while putting these poems together?

You know, the Romans said, “Memento mori” not as a recipe for dying, but as a guide for living. When we constantly acknowledge the fleeting nature of life, we live it better. This can get reduced to a cliché—a “carpe diem” t-shirt. But poetry, I think, can bring it to a deeper level, make it an elemental reminder. When I remember my mortality, I love this world more and demand more from it, and my favorite poems remind me of my mortality again and again.

I always find it fascinating to see where a poet puts the title poem, if one is present in the collection. “The Boatloads” is the very last poem in the book. What were your reasons for ending with the book with title poem?

It’s funny—in my chapbook, Charon’s Manifest, which appeared in 2005, “The Boatloads” is the initial poem. It seemed right for that smaller collection, but for the longer manuscript, it seemed that it could only appear as the last poem. A friend once paid me a huge compliment when, in an email about her reading of The Boatloads, she said that she feels like Charon’s bony finger was pointing straight off the page at her when she reached the end, that she had been challenged to confront her own mortality and her complacency in the face of horrors like those of “Song 246.” I want my readers to feel challenged like that, and I hope that the title poem works that way for many of them.

What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?

It was a close call. I had a debut reading scheduled at my MFA alma mater, UNC Greensboro, and we’d planned it for a little earlier than the book’s official release date, knowing that the books would actually be printed 2-3 weeks earlier and that I’d be able to bring some of my author copies to the reading if the university’s book store could not get their shipment in time. I’ll cut this story short—the books arrived at my door in Conway, South Carolina the day before I left for Greensboro. A lot of worry leading up to that day!

Two things that I remember most about the day the books arrived:

1. Opening the box and seeing that beautiful cover with my name on it, as well as the text of my poems on that off-white, textured paper. It seemed like such a different thing from the advance uncorrected proofs that I’d seen before. It was finally a real book.

2. My dear friend Terry Kennedy, assistant director of the UNC Greensboro program, calling me just after the books arrived to tell me, “Jack’s going to be at your reading tomorrow night.” My response was, “Jack? Jack who?” He was referring to my poetic idol, Jack Gilbert, whom I had never before met in person. How it all came about is too long a story to tell, but Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg were in the audience for my debut reading from the book, and we all went to dinner afterward. It was a pretty perfect night.

Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices?

This is just one more reason why BOA Editions is so wonderful. They have a library of art that they’ve acquired, and when I won the Poulin Prize, I was given a password to a secure website where I could peruse the amazing work of about two dozen artists. When I came across Anne Havens’s “Chairs,” I knew I’d found my cover. Then the design by Geri McCormick for that work’s incorporation into the cover was just brilliant, I think. The fading of the top and bottom panels of the original work helps to enhance its visual ambiguity. I could not be happier with the cover of my book.

Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?

A bit. And in a way, it has. In other ways, it’s made absolutely no difference. How’s that for a vague, wishy-washy answer? I don’t want to downplay the value of publication—it’s great. But I also don’t want to overvalue it. People who become obsessed with publication credits and external validation risk compromising their art. It’s great to have a book of poems published, but I was the same poet the day after publication as the day before. And if I allowed myself to believe that I was somehow different because of it, I’d be on dangerous ground, I fear.

How has your life been different since your book came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?

I’ve learned that it’s work to promote a book. Often fun work, but work—time-consuming work—just the same.

What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?

I’ve given readings at universities and at a few book festivals. In addition to this one, I’ve done interviews with Town Creek Poetry and Southern Spaces, as well as for Brian Brodeur’s “How a Poem Happens” blog (forthcoming). I’ve been very lucky to have requests for such interviews and also to have my work selected from the book for feature on Verse Daily and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. All of these experiences have been great, but as I said before, it’s also work, and I must say that I look forward to the day when it all dies down a little and I can catch my breath and focus more energy on my poems again.

What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?

I really can’t imagine getting better advice than what I did get. I was fortunate to have good people giving me good counsel for a long while.

I remember two things one of my teachers used to say:

1. “The only thing worse than not being published is being published.”

2. “Never submit your manuscript to a contest that you wouldn’t be thrilled to win.”

When you’re starting out, it’s all too easy to get overwhelmed by a sense of urgency and try to rush your book into print by any means at all. But there’s usually not the need to rush things that there seems to be. I’m glad someone impressed that upon me early.

What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing? And are any new books or other projects on the horizon? In the aforementioned Poets & Writers article, you mention you’ve begun working on a second collection? Is this finished? Or almost finished?

I hope to finish a “draft” by the end of this summer, but even achieving that, the manuscript could be another year or two from being ready. In keeping with the advice I mentioned above, I don’t want to rush my second book. Most of my favorite poets have been the slow-working, non-prolific sort: Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Jack Gilbert. Those are the poets I’d like to emulate. I’m lucky, too, because I just received tenure at my university, so there’s not the immediate pressure to publish the second book as soon as possible. I have the luxury of making sure it’s really done.

Do you have any additional advice for poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?

Persistence is omnipotent. You have to believe in your work enough to weather the inevitable disappointment. Never look at your book’s failure to win a contest as an accurate evaluation of the work’s merit. It was just a contest you didn’t win; the next one might be the one you do.

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

Hell yes. But we all have different ideas on what it means to “change the world.” I think some pretty small moments can have some pretty large effects. I know that John Keats virtually saved my soul. And I, for one, don’t think that’s a small matter.

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Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals, as well as in Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, Albergotti currently teaches creative writing and literature courses and edits the online journal Waccamaw at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC.

• Buy The Boatloads at Amazon
• Read "Turning Back" at Verse Daily
  

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#18 - Cecily Parks

How often had you sent out Field Folly Snow before it was chosen as a selection for the VQR Poetry Series?

I had been sending my manuscript out for a little over a year when it was chosen for the VQR Poetry Series. How many times? I didn’t keep track. I could look in my checkbook to count the contest entry fees, but it would be too demoralizing. I figured that I couldn’t really control when, or if, my collection would get published, and so I tried to remain slightly detached during the process.

What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?

Assembling the book was the hardest part. Before I began submitting the manuscript, I dedicated many hours to scattering the individual poems—all over this huge kitchen table in my parents’ house, or all over the floor of my apartment—and arranging and rearranging them. I wanted the order of the poems to guide readers in how to read me, so I decided to start Field Folly Snow with more accessible poems, and end with the difficult ones. Once I settled on this structure, I stuck with it. (Perhaps because I couldn’t bear to go through the assembly again.)

What about the publication of the actual poems prior to the book being published? Was there a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript?

I hadn’t ever thought, “I have to get all of these poems into journals.” However, being in journals had been (and will continue to be) a very good thing in terms of building a readership. Most of the book’s poems appeared in journals first, so I had a small, small fan base by the time the book came out. People I’d never met got in touch with me to say how much they’d admired my work in journals and looked forward to reading Field Folly Snow.

How much work did you do as far as editing the poems from the day you knew the book won to the day the book was in its final proofing stage?

Right before I was scheduled to send the final manuscript to the publisher, I replaced seven of my least favorite (and probably oldest) poems in the manuscript with seven poems I’d written the previous month at a residency. It was kind of a scary switch, because the poems were so new. Any of the edits I made after that point were small, and were most likely suggested by my wonderful copyeditor at UGA Press.

What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?

I received the book in the mail, in a nondescript brown box. When I opened it, I gave a little yelp.

Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices?

There are horse poems in the book, so I told the press that I wanted to have a horse on the cover. I sent them a .pdf of a Nicola Hicks drawing of a horse that I admired. In the end, they didn’t use it. The press gave me four wonderful cover choices, and although one of the choices was a horse cover, my editor, Ted Genoways, really encouraged me to choose the cover that I have now—bare, windswept trees in snow. I loved it once I decided on it (or, I should say, once Ted helped me decide on it). And, funnily enough, that horse image that I could have chosen appeared on the cover of novel—Split Estate by Charlotte Bacon—that came out shortly after my book.

Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?

No.

How has your life been different since your book came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?

The most rewarding part of this process has been discovering how many of my non-poet friends and acquaintances bought and read Field Folly Snow. It’s meant so much to me to have friends, family members, and people I haven’t seen for a long time supporting me. Other lovely perks have included more invitations to give readings, and more invitations to teach.

I can’t say there were that many surprises. I’d worked in book publishing and knew something about the process. But it was all thoroughly enjoyable.

What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?

I’ve set up readings for myself, and I’ve said yes every time someone has asked me to give a reading or an interview. I felt like something of a celebrity last year when my friend Jennifer Chang (whose book The History of Anonymity was published in the same series as mine) and I went on a road trip / book tour in California. I find that I’ve become a much less nervous reader over the course of the last year.

What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?

Enjoy it. You only get to publish a first book once.

What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing? And are any new books or other projects on the horizon?

For the past year I’ve tried to write poems that are as different as possible in form and subject matter from the ones in Field Folly Snow. But I haven’t written all that much, and the poems I have written are, I suspect, not that disassociated from those in my first collection. Mostly, I am writing slowly, and with the belief that I am not likely to have a second collection completed for at least five years.

Do you have any additional advice for poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?

Although I can’t say that I followed this strictly, I would say: Resist the urge to fiddle with your manuscript once you’re happy with it. I feel like sometimes people fiddle and fiddle and fiddle, and what they end up with is a combination of their first book and their second book.

Also, only submit to places that you feel strongly about. And have the conviction that in the end, you only want to be with a press who really wants you.

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

Yes. I have been reading Emerson, and I like the way he states a poet’s aspiration: “There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.”

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Cecily Parks is the author of Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press/VQR Poetry Series, 2008) and the chapbook Cold Work (Poetry Society of America, 2005). Her poems and reviews are forthcoming in Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, and Publishers Weekly. A Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, she lives in New York.

• Buy Field Folly Snow at Amazon
• Read three poems in Blackbird
• Read three poems in Octopus
  

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#17 - Randall Mann

How often had you sent out Complaint in the Garden before it won the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry?

I sent the manuscript out for six years, 1997 through 2003.

What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?

Oh, it went through endless versions the first few years. Early on it was just my MFA thesis plus whatever was lying around, yikes. But I wrote the last poem in the book in 2000, and after that the book stabilized.

What about the publication of the actual poems prior to the book being published? Was there a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript, or was the focus primarily on assembling the manuscript without worrying about previous publications?

I was very concerned about publishing as many poems as possible, and in good places, if possible; I was concerned about “building an audience,” which is maybe a touch naïve, maybe not. I think all but one of the poems were published in a magazine first.

Zoo Press no longer exists, but it seems like the book is readily available and still in print. Had you known that Zoo Press wouldn’t be around soon after the book was published, would you have opted to keep sending it out to find a different home for it?

Complaint in the Garden is technically out of print, though Orchises Press kindly adopted it and continues to make it available in its catalogue and on Amazon and such. I think I would have gone ahead and let Zoo publish the thing, even knowing what I know now; it was, is, such an honor to be selected by David Baker and have the book associated with The Kenyon Review.

One of the things that a reader may encounter upon first reading the poems in Complaint in the Garden is the many poems in traditional forms: sonnets, villanelles, heroic couplets, etc. The impressive thing about the poems is often you can’t recognize this unless you’re looking for it, which is a good sign the poem is successful. Was there a necessity to write in forms, or is this something you had been doing for a while? I ask because forms like sestinas and villanelles are often written out of not only obsession, but obsession for a certain repetition that only traditional forms can really satisfy.

I have always loved the gamesmanship of formal poems, the challenge and demand of constraint. I had a subject—for example, the selling of my dead grandmother’s belongings at a yard sale in the poem “Yard Sale”—and so I thought, in this case, the turning and returning not only to her stuff but to the past and to her death made a case for trying a villanelle.

Who are some of your influences, and who were your influences especially when writing Complaint in the Garden?

When writing Complaint in the Garden, some essential ones were Hardy, Auden, Stevens, Moore, Lowell, Bishop, Justice, Hecht, Larkin, Walcott, Ashbery. And always, always Frost.

The book includes no sections—it starts with the first poem and ends with the last poem continuously—rather than multiple sections like a lot of first books. Was it always this way? Was this a conscious choice as you were constructing it?

Layout was always an afterthought to composition; I tried two sections and three sections but I settled on no sections I think because some of the main themes of the book—queer love, Florida landscape and history, disaffection—surfaced and overlapped in so many of the poems.

What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?

It was late March 2004, and I was sitting at my desk at work, and I opened the box and pulled out this beautiful thing that seemed to mean everything.

Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices?

I suggested several collages by Debora Greger; this was one of them; Zoo was kind enough to send me several mock-ups of covers with her collages, and I liked this best.

Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?

Yes, but not so grand, really; I imagined it would change because writers have books and if I had a book, well, the world might see me as a real writer.

What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?

I made sure it was sent to every possible magazine and newspaper that might take a look or give it ink; I sent to the gay press, which was very receptive. The Zoo publicity engine-that-could fell off the tracks fairly early on, so I took control, but it was difficult, and Complaint probably didn’t get considered for awards and such the way it should have been. But that’s the small-press life. I was determined, after almost a decade of writing it and six years of sending it out, that it would not go unnoticed.

What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing?

Other than feeling good about being a writer, none.

Your second book of poems, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, will be coming out in the Spring of 2009. Tell us about the book. How long have you been working on it? What can readers expect from it?

As I have grown more ragged and unsure, so have my poems. The poems are mostly set in San Francisco. There is a queer, I hope unforgiving, anxiety, and a harsher take on love and loss and landscape. I worked on the book for nine years.

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

In its secret secret way, yes.

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Randall Mann is the author of two poetry collections, Breakfast with Thom Gunn (University of Chicago 2009), and Complaint in the Garden (Zoo/Orchises 2004), winner of the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize; and co-author of the textbook Writing Poems (Pearson Longman 2007). His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Pleaides, The Kenyon Review, Salmugundi, and Contemporary Poetry Review. He works as an editor and lives in San Francisco.

• Buy Complaint in the Garden at Amazon
• Buy Breakfast with Thom Gunn at Amazon
• Read "The Sunset" at Verse Daily
• Read "Aubade" at the University of Chicago Press
  

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#16 - Alison Stone

How often had you sent out They Sing at Midnight before it was chosen as the winner of the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Prize?

Countless times. I came in second in the Barnard New Woman Poets Series in 1988, and every year after that I sent to most of the national contests. I was a finalist in a bunch of them, some repeatedly, which gave me the encouragement to keep spending the entry fees.

What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?

The first version was my undergraduate senior thesis. This version was more obviously influenced by music than later drafts; I had song lyrics in a column on the left, interspersed with the poems. I abandoned that by the next draft, which is the one that Barnard liked. After that, I kept revising poems and also writing new poems and taking poems out. By the time it was published, I had switched the poems so thoroughly, it was actually my second or third book.

What about the publication of the actual poems prior to the book being published? Was there a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript?

A concern? I thought that would be a plus! I figured it would show editors that other editors liked me, as well as hopefully creating a readership for my work.

How much work did you do as far as editing the poems from the day you knew the book won to the day the book was in its final proofing stage?

By the time it was accepted, I had revised the book so many times, with input from so many people, that it was overcooked. I read it a few more times line by line and fiddled with line breaks, put commas in and took them out. I had finished any substantial revisions a few years earlier.

In addition to being a poet, you’re also a painter and a visual artist. What kind of influences do the visual arts have on the spoken word, especially with your own poetry?

That’s a big question! The relationship between the two has taken so many configurations throughout history—people who do both, like Blake, friendships between poets and painters, the influence of Cubism on Eliot, poems written about paintings, etc. In terms of my own work, I think that anything creative opens channels and keeps energy flowing. So painting inspires me to write and vise versa. When I was at art school, I wanted to make paintings that “went with” my poems, to combine them somehow. But abstraction was the prevailing style at my school, and the teacher was quite dismissive: “The illustration department’s down the hall, if you’d rather be there.”

There are a few ekphrastic poems in They Sing at Midnight ("On Display" and "Psyche" were stimulated by painting and sculpture, respectively), also "Swan Lake," which was inspired by a ballet. Recently I finished a sequence of poems in the voices of the Major Arcana of the tarot. That was the most intense and extended connection I’ve made between the two.

What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?

I got home from work at 11:30, and the boxes were waiting in the entryway. I had a new baby and hadn’t slept in three months, so the whole time seems blurry and surreal. I do remember feeling a sense of “Wow, finally.”

The cover image is one of your own paintings. How long did it take you to decide on this particular painting? It seems to not only fit well with the poems in the book, but did it also save you money and the possible headache of finding the perfect art for your book cover?

I never thought about saving money; I just knew I wanted my art on the cover. I was very excited about The Stone Tarot, so I decided to use one of those images. The Moon symbolizes night, the emergence of what has been repressed, memory, fear, and the journey to change. That seemed to fit the themes of the book.

How has your life been different since your book came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?

I had a fantasy—awards, packed readings, a teaching position. None of that happened, so I’m very lucky to have a creative non-poetry job that I love.

The most wonderful surprise is when, a few times, people would see the book or hear someone call me by name and say, “You’re Alison Stone? I remember your poems from Poetry.”

What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?

I was able to get a few readings after the book came out (a local library, Barnes and Noble, a group NYQ reading.) I was also part of two book fairs for books published that year, one at Poets House and one at a museum in Nyack. Over the years, I’ve read at Brandeis, which was quite emotional for me, and several bookstores in MA. My mom lived in MA, and she would set things up for me. Recently MMM did a group reading and had a table at AWP. Hopefully I’m a better poet than I am a networker or promoter, because I still feel very unsure of how to go about the whole thing.

What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?

Before the book arrives, find out from the press exactly what they are planning to do to promote it. Then make arrangements to do the rest yourself. And if you’re like me and have no idea of how to do that, ask someone who is good at it for advice. Also, try not to time having a baby for the same time the book is released.

What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing?

It allowed me to finally close the Gestalt on that book and consider all new poems as part of a new book.

And are any new books or other projects on the horizon?

I have a second manuscript finished. I had many of those poems written in rough drafts before They Sing at Midnight came out; and I revised most of them during one semester at the Pine Manor MFA program. It’s such a supportive and stimulating community. The book is tentatively titled Hair to Sky. I also have the sequence of tarot poems I mentioned earlier, which I might hold for a third book or publish as a chapbook, From the Fool to the World.

Do you have any additional advice for poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?

If you believe in your book, then keep sending it out, no matter how long it takes.

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

Yes, because anything that changes one person changes the world. The process of writing, at its best, connects the writer to a fragment of truth and allows her or him to record it. Even if the poet isn’t tuned in in that way, the act of writing can help in working through an issue or emotion (Though the poems made this way often are not very interesting.) Then when a good poem finds its readers, they are moved in the process of reading. Any authentic contact creates change. At the same time, neither reading nor writing poetry frees us from the need for more direct world-changing actions, like political action, meditation, or practicing compassion in our relationships.

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Alison Stone’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and a variety of other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin award. Her first book, They Sing at Midnight, won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award and was published by Many Mountains Moving Press. She is also a visual artist and the creator of The Stone Tarot.

• Visit Alison's website
• Buy They Sing at Midnight from Amazon
• Visit the page for They Sing at Midnight at MMM

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#15 - James Allen Hall

How often had you sent out Now You’re the Enemy before it was chosen for The University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series?

Should I say I don't remember and appear nonchalant about this part of the process, a hipster saying, “I don't care if it ever gets published, man, it's the art that matters….”

Well, I won't, though it is the art that matters. I kept immaculate count. Now You’re the Enemy traveled to twenty-seven contests, open reading periods, and interested editors before it found a home. It finalized a few times for contests like the Whitman, which gave me hope that the manuscript yielded a compelling reading experience. I sent it out first in May of 2006, thinking it was done. It wasn't. Early readers and contests turned it away, sometimes with kindness.

By October, I knew the book was completely finished. I couldn't do anything more for it. Now You’re the Enemy confronts suicide, violent love, and self-excoriation at the same time that it points at the ways in which narrative can heal and empower. I didn't want to add more weight to those frameworks; I needed it to be stately without overwhelming the reader. In June '07, Enid Shomer, University of Arkansas' Poetry Series Editor, called to offer a contract.

I remember that moment: I pulled the phone away because I didn't want to shatter Enid's eardrum.

Had it always been Now You’re the Enemy or had it gone through different titles?

One former name carried the book through a manuscript workshop at the University of Houston. I hope my compatriots will do me the great honor of forgetting that awful title.
Another story, about the title, seems important to tell.

My younger brother and I were talking one night while we cooked dinner. Dustin had met this beautiful man, they dated briefly, and we were analyzing the demise of the relationship over dinner.

Dustin said to me, "Whenever a man says I love you, the first thing I think is, Great. Now you're the enemy." It was the saddest and most lacerating statement; it nailed exactly the feeling of the poems I'd been fashioning—this book about loving a self-destructive mother figure, how that shapes subjectivity, and what happens when we find ourselves shipwrecked on the shores of Love Always Fails Us.

On your blog, you have a few links to poems in Now You're the Enemy. One of the things I noticed about some of those poems was the different forms that some of them take on (mostly dealing with the length of stanzas and the line-break and enjambment choices), which leads me to a question for some reason that I'm fascinated with: How "ready" should a poem be for publication when writers send them out to journals? And does the poem really become "final," then, with the book, and not with former publication in a journal or magazine?

You're asking me, Keith, about iteration and identity, my two favorite things.

No identity is stable. That's the short answer.

"The end" is a construct we need for stories to have shape, for the work of interpretation and reflection to begin. But there is no such thing as an ending. In "Portrait of My Mother as Victorine Meurent," the speaker exiles the mother "out of my life forever." That "forever" sure is some damn hard wishful thinking. The line says more about longing than it does the fact of time.

There's a different kind of editing you do when you're: polishing a poem for its first read by friends or class; revising a poem to send out to journals; revising a poem so that it converses with the other poems in a book in an un/neighborly way; revising a poem for a forthcoming book in which, you feel at least, the last version of that poem will be iterated for all time.

If a journal wants you to change something about your poem, why not? Unless the suggestion is embarrassing or downright rude, you'll have another say in book form. But, then, I've always been energized by letting my poems live in different skins. The more radical re-envisioning the better. I love stories about writers who hound down their books in stores and stand in front of the stacks, making their revisions by hand, bending back the spines and doing that particularized surgery.

You must abandon the poem, knowing when it's able to speak on its own. Trust that the gaps in the saying are just as important; they are perhaps the most integral part of the subject matter.

I used to edit for Gulf Coast, a literary journal produced out of the University of Houston. I saw a lot of writing that could use some shelf time. Like any of us, art needs a disco nap before it can rock the party.

Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?

I always felt that getting published was happening to someone I kind of knew, someone I kinda liked. He'd written this book and I was delighted for him, like you are when your friend gives birth.

After it was taken, I wanted to forget the book. I wanted the next one. I felt like a bad parent, stewarding the book into the world, then neglecting it. I want it to have its own life, and me its Auntie Mame. I'm still negotiating those feelings.

Publication gave me permission to move out of the dark world of Now You’re the Enemy to another place, one where people greet each other at the post office, where it's possible to believe in a love that doesn't utterly destroy you. I imagined I could finally stop grieving.

It changed everything, and it changed nothing. It changed what I imagine, but not how I imagine.

What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?

I first saw my book at UA's AWP Book Fair booth. I remember thinking it was odd to hold in my hands what had been so long in my head.

A funny mix-up occurred five days earlier: a box of books had been sent to my apartment in Pennsylvania, where I lived at the time. My friend Julie and her girlfriend Angie were coming over that evening, by coincidence, and Julie had just been fascinated by the whole process. I let her open the box, and she handled the scissors almost tenderly.

What she pulled out was There When We Needed Him, a book on civil rights warrior Wiley Austin Branton. Copy after copy of that book. Mine nowhere to be found.

It was then I learned how appropriate it was to feel diminished ownership over Now You're the Enemy.

Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices?

The University of Arkansas Press staff was wonderful about this part of the process. They understand the intimate relationship a writer has with her or his poems, and so they solicited my input about cover art. After poring through Getty Images and contacting artist friends, I sent a selection of images to the Press.

The press liked a darker print, Dominic Rouse's Hanger: God, what a gorgeous image-maker Rouse is. But I worried that the color palate was too muted, and that the subject—a closet opened to reveal a noose—might limit the echoes the book makes.

In Houston, I once worked as the Poetry Curator for an independent literary bookstore. So, I had a pretty good idea of what kind of cover would stand out. When I submitted the images to the Press, I wrote a kind of apologia for the one I wanted, the Steve Casimiro photograph of a woman behind a blue screen. She's there to help you; she intends to hurt you. In the background, a palm tree tries to stay rooted in the earth. There's a hurricane on.

I can't say enough nice things about the University of Arkansas Press. They really did keep me involved and informed throughout the entire process. And they make beautiful books. Now, if only I could change my author photo. What was I thinking?

How has your life been different since your book came out?

The normal things have changed: I give readings. Sometimes people contact me on Facebook or email me out of the blue or say something about my book on a blog. Those kind of communiqués make me feel like I'm being seen for the first time in my life.

Since my book came out, I'm a lot less in love with my ex-boyfriend.

Since my book came out, I'm a little less in love with the poems that make the book. Toni Morrison has said that she writes because she wasn't reading the stories she wanted to read. It's a good sign, I think, to be searching for the new stories I want to hear.

Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?

I thought my little book would be ignored. I'm pleasantly surprised that hasn't been entirely the case.

What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?

I never met a spotlight I didn't like. I'm performative and outgoing. Truth be told, Keith, I'm a good time on two legs.

Now You're the Enemy confronts sexual and physical violence. When I first read from it, I almost broke down in tears. It's a raw book. I feel like I'm an exposed nerve every time I open it. The book is like reading a knife. I used to apologize for that: sorry, room full of listeners, for my sad little poems that break your heart. I think I was apologizing to myself more than the audience. It is painful to re-enter that book.

But it humbles and utterly sustains me to remember that there are loads of people out there for whom poetry matters. Poetry creates communities. Poetry brings us together, makes us feel less alone in our bodies. If I can add my voice to that, I'll suffer through the hacksaw on my aorta.

What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?

Reading these first book interviews covered it. Seeing my friends steward their own books through the process really helped too.

In addition to poetry, you've also published some recent non-fiction pieces. A very personal piece, "Suicide Memorabilia," was recently published in Pebble Lake Review. Are you working toward a memoir with these pieces?

Yes, I'm making headway on a book called I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well. The essays are about growing up with a Springer-esque family during the outlandish socio-political landscape of the 1980s and 90s. I've published pieces about A.I.D.S., my grandmother's predilections for nudity, my mother's suicide attempts, and a new essay about sexuality and terror, which includes a short anecdote about the time my brother was harassed by the FBI after making a pass at a man.

Speaking of "Suicide Memorabilia," I kept being reminded of certain events in poems from Now You're the Enemy. How hard is it to keep poetry separate from autobiography? Or is this something that you think should be embraced?

Louise Glück's penultimate sentence in her poem "Parable of the Dove" reads in part, "change your form and you change your nature."

I feel when you change the form, you alter the story entirely. Tonally, for instance, I find it easier to be lighthearted, arch-eyebrowed, and irreverent in prose.

Two weeks ago, my mother called me. She quoted my poem "The Enemy" back to me. Her vowels were sharp and her voice embittered as she finished. "So, when I say I love you," she said, "you feel like I'm your enemy." I said if she wanted to know how I felt, she'd have to wait for the memoir.

My poems take liberties, invent details, conflate characters. In regard to the spectrum of truth, poetry can negotiate a different contract with the reader. Nonfiction must always present itself as the truth.

How have these non-fiction pieces influenced your poetry writing?

Writing in two genres allows me to recharge my batteries for, say, poetry while I finish a personal essay. The two also inform each other. As a memoirist/poet, I rumple the well-made bed of narrative progression with an insistence on sonic texture and lyric structure. Even if/as I remain allied to dramatic situation. As a poet/memoirist, I allow my interests in queer theory, art history, and film to suggest strategies for the poems I'm writing. Even if/as I remain allied to vivid image.

Poets often seem to write memoirs, and though they're not necessarily inseparable, it's a genre toward which many poets eventually gravitate. Why do you think this is?

Because we want to make some money.

Well, that's flip of me. There are tons of reasons, of course, to write.

I remember Mark Doty saying, in a nonfiction class, that he began to write prose after his first husband's death from complications due to A.I.D.S. I think after such a deeply personal devastation like that—and reading his Heaven's Coast is enormously telling here—he found comfort? a way to move forward? in prose. It didn't have to be poetry; how could poetry exist in a world so bereft? There wasn't anything to sing. I'm paraphrasing badly here. Of course Mark Doty's prose is beautiful and lyric. He's incapable of ungorgeous lines. I'm saying that writing in that genre propelled him forward after facing the blank page—after making art—seemed insurmountable.

Maybe because poets want transformation: for us, metaphor is dope. So, why not transform genre?

Maybe because all poets don't feel narrative compulsion in poetry, and sometimes want to tell our stories. So why not go to a narrative form?

Maybe because stories exceed the boxes they're put in—so why not put the overflow in a different container?

I write nonfiction because it's fun to render without the silence that is integral in poetry. It's fun to make other shapes. It's fun to push the limits of image. It's fun to write dialogue and use footnotes…. The list seems endless.

What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing? And are any other new books or other projects on the horizon?

Publishing Now You're the Enemy cleared my head; I could begin writing poems again. Besides the memoir, I'm working on a second manuscript of poems, tentatively titled Hand of a Lover. Publishing a first book forces you to discover what else you are compelled to say.

Do you have any additional advice for poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?

April Bernard: "You chose to be a writer, to say the difficult thing. Say the difficult thing."

Liam Rector: "Always Be Closing."

Ellen Bryant Voigt: "Write more syntactically interesting sentences."

Jorie Graham, quoting Frost?: "No discovery for the writer, no discovery for the reader."

Find your aesthetic. Then read the opposite, or adjoining, aesthetic. Read prose on poetry by poets. Wallace Stevens' "The Irrational Element in Poetry" changed the way I write. Ditto for Louise Glück's Proofs and Theories. I recommend a wonderful anthology called Women Reclaim Poetry edited by Molly McQuade.

If there's an opportunity to show your writing to other writers, take it. Everyone has something to teach you. Your job is to find what that something is, then to separate the useful from the useless (and sometimes detrimental). Seek out smart criticism, the most blunt, most honest that you can find. Pray that your teachers are hard on you, and let their voices into your process. As hard as they are on you, be even harder on yourself. When praise comes along, relish it half as much as critique, but twice as long.

Courtney Love: "I want to be the girl with the most cake."

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

Yes, I believe poetry can change the world. Though it is both a great advantage and a great misfortune that the earth is possessed of no memory.

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James Allen Hall teaches creative writing at the State University of New York at Potsdam. His first collection of poetry, Now You're the Enemy, was a winner in the 2007 Arkansas Poetry Series and was a finalist that year for the Walt Whitman Award. He can see Canada from his house.

• Visit James's Blog
• Buy Now You're the Enemy at Amazon
  
• Read "Family Portrait" at Verse Daily
• Read "Wedding Dress" in West Branch
  

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#14 - Alison Pelegrin

How often had you sent out The Zydeco Tablets before it was accepted for publication by Word Press? Was this a contest or an open reading period?

I had been sending out The Zydeco Tablets for years—long before it was ready. The last version was a revision I worked just before the birth of my first son—instead of the nesting instinct, I had the revision bug.

How did you decide on the order and structure of the book?

You know, it has been so long since I was ordering that book (December 2001) I had to look at the sections. I am not one to fret in an extreme manner over the order poems appear in a book. I mean, I think about it, but I don’t lose sleep over it, one reason being that I almost never read a book of poems in order. Looking back at The Zydeco Tablets, I can say I don’t really know what I was thinking—it seems self conscious to me now, and too many. Maybe my next book will have no sections.

What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?

I didn’t pick it up and smell it or feel giddy, as so many authors have described. I was a little afraid of it, and I was grieving the death of my father, who never knew about the book though he informed it in so many ways. Also, I had a nine month old at the time, and was four or five months pregnant, and the idea of finishing a poem again—much less a book, seemed utterly impossible.

(In a footnote to this comment, I’ll add that after the initial elation I felt this grief with Big Muddy as well. It contained everything—I had nothing in reserve. After a few months, though, I was ready to move on to the next project.)

Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices? It’s not often that you see a black and white cover with such a wild design for a book of poetry.

I had a lot of input on the cover image. At the time, Word Press was doing only black and white covers, and I did not want to go the black-and-white-photo-of-Louisiana-cliché route. The book was a lot about music, and I wanted the cover to reflect that, for it to look like a sign you’d see stapled to a light pole advertising a show at Tipitina’s or something. I communicated this to an artist, and this is what she came up with. The ooh la la! was my idea.

Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?

Yes, I did expect my life to change! And yes, there is still a small part of me who wishes that the rock star image and lifestyle (you know, dark glasses, a driver, and life in a hotel room) were part of my existence as a poet.

How has your life been different since your book came out?

Externally, my life has not been noticeably different since my book—either book—came out. On the inside, I did feel pretty excited.

Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?

The biggest surprise to me was how hard it was to get the book in stores. At the time my book was published, Word Press went from a traditional print run to POD. This was a move they did to make it easier to get the book into chain book stores, but I found that larger chains were not at all receptive to POD books. I do not know how other Word Press authors have dealt with this. I’ve never seen a copy of The Zydeco Tablets in a big chain store, and with smaller sellers, I mostly sold the books on consignment—my discounted copies sold at the same discount to the seller.

What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?

I sent letters to books stores and libraries, and I believe that Word Press sent out a mailing. I read everywhere I could. I always sell copies after a reading, and I travel with copies of my books in my trunk.

What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?

I wish someone would have told me to hold out until you find what you want. Don’t be in such a rush to get the first book out, especially if you have copies of a chapbook you can sell at readings.

Booze plays a prominent part in your work, yet it’s tastefully amidst everything that’s going on in poems, never becoming a parody or a vice necessarily. Whether it’s Li Po arriving drunk as an inspiring muse, or the narrator having a drink to take the edge of, it’s done without force, and is used both playfully and seriously in the poems, sometimes at once. Is this the real Alison Pelegrin drinking to inspire the muse, or is the poet Alison Pelegrin, and why is there so much alcohol flowing through these poems?

I grew up around drinking—the good, the bad, the ugly. Thanksgiving time is the anniversary of my first drunk—off of watered down port wine snuck to me by my grandfather. I passed out under the table in media meal and experienced tunnel vision. As far as the drinking in the poems, I should say that before I finished Big Muddy River of Stars, the working title of the book was Three Sheets. I am clumsy at discussing such things, but it was meant to be a metaphor for drinking and for the writing process. If you’ve read anything about the ancient Chinese poet Li Po, about whom there are several poems in the second book, you may have read the story of how he (supposedly) would write poems that came to him, and then send the pages floating down the Yangtze River. I would never do that myself, but I liked the idea. Also, I was living on a river myself while I was writing those poems, very much the outsider in Livingston Parish (Once some visitors to the property next door had a cigarette boat named “The Blown Job"), and I felt that Li Po could just rise up out of the mist and watch herons with me on the dock.

I’m struck by the almost tour-de-force third section in Big Muddy River of Stars, where the poems seem to be written post-Katrina. They almost seem to have been written out of necessity, to get through living after the hurricane, to find one’s place in the world again, both as poet and mother looking after her family. In that respect, I want to ask how the book was constructed, as the third section is such a vital part of the book, yet it does seem extremely cohesive and deliberate as a whole.

Thanks. It makes me happy to hear people say they enjoy the third section of the book because it hits so close to home—I have never been so directly personal as in those poems about the aftermath of Katrina. That was such a dark time for me, in so many ways. I accepted food stamps. I lied to find a place to stay. There was one day when I couldn’t get a dinner together for my children. And comparatively, I was one of the lucky ones.

As for cohesive and deliberate—I can’t take credit really. It just happened. I couldn’t put the new poems with the old poems from that book—my world, and the landscape informing the book—was permanently altered. The title Big Muddy River of Stars came to me after a particularly fitful night on the air mattress, and the poems came a few months later.

After Katrina my life was a blur—I was displaced with my family and my mother and brother, and my days were so taken up with technicalities and depression. No comfort food. No zoo to take my kids to. No Christmas lights. I felt no room or desire for poetry in those early months. It wasn’t until May and June of 2006 that I sat down at my kitchen room table while the final repairs that we could afford were going on around me and was I able to put it into some sort of perspective. Even so, when I read those poems now, I don’t know what happened. Or, I guess I could say—I can’t believe those things happened to me.

Do you have any additional advice for first poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?

Learn everything you can about the presses you submit to, and don’t let yourself think about the odds.

Do I believe poetry can change the world?

Yes I do. Sometimes when I get really excited about a poem in front of a class, I catch myself waving the anthology around, and I think I must look like a preacher at the pulpit trying to convert the masses. This is a good metaphor, because poetry feels like my religion. In good or bad times, I am as likely to turn to poetry as to prayer. I think the best prayers are poetry—like the Psalms, which in my Episcopal congregation are sung in unison. Riding my bike on a gorgeous fall day like today, I am just as likely to think “The brain is wider than the sky,” as “My cup runneth over.” Either way, my world is altered.

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In addition to Big Muddy River of Stars, Alison Pelegrin is the author of The Zydeco Tablets (Word Press, 2002) as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, and in dozens of literary journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review. The recipient of fellowships from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and the NEA, she was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She teaches English at Southeastern Louisiana University and lives in Mandeville, Louisiana with her family.

• Buy The Zydeco Tablets from Amazon
• Buy Big Muddy River of Stars from Amazon
• Read two poems at Blackbird
• Read a poem at Verse Daily
  

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