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Your poetry is awash with opposing ideas/ideals, male/female, young/old, innocent/guilty, what influences you in your work?
I have always been an obsessive reader and re-reader, with a strong attachment to literature of the past: to novelists like Dickens and the Brontës and Tolstoy; to poets like Keats and Shakespeare and Coleridge. I’ve just spent two years copying out all of Milton’s Paradise Lost word for word. I suppose you could say I feel driven to absorb these writers into my blood. And all of them deal with the classic dramatic situations of existence, the natural yet tragic oppositions in our characters and our fates.
So much of your work seems so inherently personal, how much of it is and how much is just your creative interpretation of life?
Boy Land & Other Poems was published in 2004, and I wrote the poems in that collection over a period of ten years. So in many ways it seems like past history to me because it’s the book of a younger woman. I was learning to write about what was close to me: my family, myself. I think that many first books are similar exercises. Nonetheless, the poems are not necessarily factual. I exaggerate and conflate and purposely misremember. It’s important for readers—and especially writers—to remember that poems are not diary anecdotes blurted onto the page but aesthetic objects, worked and reworked, shaped and reshaped. The end result may be an autobiographical lie yet nonetheless tell the truth.
The poems forthcoming in my next collection, How the Crimes Happened, are somewhat different from those in Boy Land. In the new collection I frequently invent characters and speak in other voices. Partly, I think, I got my own story out of my system in the first collection. And I partly I had become experienced and confident enough as a writer to begin stepping into other lives.
How does one get involved in and get taken seriously in the poetry world? And should one make it a goal to be taken seriously in a world that occasionally takes itself far too seriously?
This is difficult question for me to answer because I am outsider myself in the poetry business. I am not an academic, and I don’t have an MFA. I don’t even have a full-time job. I rarely submit to contests because they cost money that I can’t afford to spend. What success I’ve had has been predicated on the rare good fortune of meeting Baron Wormser. In the late 1990s I signed up for a poetry workshop that he was teaching in Maine. He then invited me to study with him privately, and I spent several years under his mentorship. Baron is a great teacher, but he is also a great model for a writer who wants to remain solitary and independent. He has introduced me to other poets, yet he has also encouraged me to trust my own paths of reading and discovery. His trust in my abilities has been an invaluable gift.
But I’ve also had some dumb luck. I sent Boy Land as an unsolicited submission to a publisher who miraculously accepted it. This hardly ever happens, and I’m very grateful to have accidentally stumbled into a publisher who believed that the collection had merit. Nonetheless, it took me several years to place the second collection. For the most part, the poetry business is intimately linked with the academic world; and the contest system now controls the submissions process. There are still publishers who work outside that system, and there are still editors who look beyond résumés and literary fashions. But finding them can be difficult, and the effort is frequently dispiriting.
It’s important to remember, though, that journals and book publishers might be rejecting your work because it’s just not good enough to publish. I have to face that fact every time I get a rejection letter. Writing poetry is really, really hard. When I think of the numbers of bad poems I’ve submitted to journals, I feel embarrassed all over again. Sure, sometimes I see published poems I hate. And sometimes I shake my head over dreadful prize-winning collections of cold-hearted dreck. And I know unscrupulous publishers exist and that some of our most famous contemporary poets are shameless self-promoters with questionable talent. But to claim “the fix is in” about all journals and publishers is to miss part of the point of being a poet: the work wouldn’t be worth doing if it weren’t almost impossible to be good at it.
So in answer to the second half of your question, I think there’s a difference between poetry and the business of poetry. The business side is undoubtedly frustrating and flawed, but that doesn’t keep me from taking poetry itself seriously.
What fuels your desire to write?
Well, to be blunt, I write because I have the knack and the skill. I’m a voracious reader, and I’m facile with language and narrative, and I have a curious eye and a strong interest in the minutiae of grammar and the flexibilities of sound. Of course, there’s a flip side to the situation: I have to push myself through the boring, dutiful hard work of actually doing the writing: studying the poets and novelists I admire (or struggle with); sitting down at my desk and cranking out a first draft; then revising and revising and revising. I’ve had to learn to value the revision process, which may be the single hardest thing for a talented writer to achieve. Good writers tend to fall in love with their own words, and the idea of throwing them out is exquisitely painful. But you have to do it. And you have to be selfish about setting aside time to read and write. That’s not always easy, either for you or the people around you. But it’s vital.
How did you originally get interested in poetry?
My mother is a poet with a doctorate degree in English; my father is a professor of American studies who has also written novels and poems. I grew up with parents who took reading seriously, who believed in the power of books, who read Blake’s poems aloud as bedtime stories. And when I was six, I also began training as a classical violinist. That was the same year I learned to read, so very early my brain began playing with the music of language.
What art moves you?
As I said, I trained as a violinist, so I’ve always been involved with music. But in college I fell in love with rock and roll. Up to that point I’d known almost nothing about pop music, so the experience was a bit like being born again: I’d never learned how to hear a blues riff, a power chord, a bridge. But I was instantly seduced by the melodramatic intensity, which mirrored my own adolescent emotional fervors. It also taught me that the high excitements of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven aren’t so far removed from dramas of the Clash or the Replacements.
I’m interested in the other arts as well, though I’m more of a bystander than a participator. My husband, Thomas Birtwistle, is a photographer, and his family is very interested in theater and the visual arts; so I’ve learned a great deal from them about ways of seeing. My father-in-law is a theater professor, and his insight into Shakespeare as physical enactment has been a wonderful aid to a word-bound daughter-in-law.
How can we as a society encourage students to embrace poetry and the arts in a world overwhelmed with the exact opposite?
Teachers, of course, have a direct line to students; and many teachers go into the profession because they love their subject matter. This sounds like a perfect scenario for passing on a love of poetry to young people. Unfortunately, however, public schools are overwhelmed with curricular, administrative, and testing burdens, not to mention social and disciplinary ills. And teachers find it hard in such an oppressive environment to advocate for the arts. Poetry isn’t goal-oriented job training; it requires a kind of self-motivated distraction that is often antithetical to “good student” behavior.
If you think back to Elizabethan society, you see that many of England’s greatest (and most unscrupulous) politicians and soldiers were also accomplished poets. Times have changed; I daresay Dick Cheney is not working hard on a sonnet cycle in his spare time. Poetry no longer has much public prowess. But it still maintains its personal power. Poets still write because they are compelled to write and because poetry is an avenue to freedom.
I can’t change society as a whole. What I can do is to show students that I am passionate about my vocation. If you’re a teacher, don’t be afraid to put yourself on the line. If you don’t love what you do, how can you convince your students to love it? Then let them read poems. Let them ask questions, express their likes and dislikes. Push them to explain themselves. Ask their advice. In short, teach them the art of civil intellectual discourse. Then give them the opportunity to imitate others poets, to experiment with forms, to revise. All these pieces, both discussions and written work, can be graded and assessed. The fact is that you can make the bigwigs happy and still be an activist teacher who gives students at all levels, kindergarten through adulthood, the freedom to speak about things that really matter to them personally and to grow intellectually and emotionally.
What does poetry do for you?
Some poems make me less cynical, more inclined to believe in a core of goodness in this world. Some poems bewilder me with sound or image, thrust me into a state of surreal confusion. Some poems are a kind of microscope, pressing me to notice tiny objects or incidents. Some expose the meagerness of my intellect. Some poems make me want to have sex with my husband. Some make me terrified of dying. Some make me want to write my own poem. Some make me want to throw away the magazine and play badminton instead. Some poems make my heart race faster, and the air takes on a tinge of gold, and I think, “Of course,” but after a moment I know there is nothing more to say.
Potter is one of several poets taking part in the Frost Place conference on Poetry and Teaching from June 30th to the Fourth of July in Franconia, NH. For more info visit the Frost Place website at;
http://www.frostplace.org/html/conference-teaching.html
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