An interview with Barry Marks

Negative Capability Press is happy to announce the release of Dividing by Zero by Barry Marks – Birmingham, Alabama attorney and author of the 2010 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist Sounding.

Dividing by Zero is a a riveting volume of poems, stories and narratives that weave a complex tale about a man, Raymond Shaw, who commits suicide and his daughter L. The unique structure, which Marks uses to tell both L. and Raymond's story, is inspired by the Talmud – the Jewish Rabbinic text that contains statements of religious law, case histories and interpretative notes on each page. 

This title is available through your local independent bookstore via IndieBound or on Amazon.com and will soon be available for distribution through SPD (Small Press Distribution).  

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Barry, Negative Capability Press is proud to publish Dividing By Zero.  I think a lot of our readers would be interested in learning more about the book, especially your thoughts about the process as you wrote it.  

We don't usually ask this about poetry books, but what is Dividing By Zero about?

 Well, it isn't exactly a poetry book and there is a story. A daughter finds her father's unpublished poems, work he never shared. She resolves to publish it along with a strange narrative he left about his life and her own stories and memories of life with him.

The book combines poetry, fiction and personal remembrances. Did it start out that way?

Yes and no. Years ago, I was introduced to the Talmud, a centuries-old rabbinic text in which each page contains a statement of religious law and case history, augmented with commentary in the margins by half-a-dozen rabbis and scholars.

That seemed to me to be a wonderful way to express something difficult to describe, be it the law or human experience. How can we state the "truth" unless we can see it from many perspectives at once. A sort of written cubism seems necessary to address the mystery of truth.

 As I assembled poetry for a new book, I kept feeling that something was missing and that there should be more than just poems. One day, I remembered the Talmud and it mushroomed from there. I decided I wanted to present multiple points of view, but more than that, multiple modes of written communication, not only poetry and what it can share, but fiction and its allegorical message and narratives with their often flawed perspectives.

The poems are at first funny, then increasingly thoughtful and finally downright somber. Are you saying that this is how life is?

 No. Bear in mind that the conceit is that the poets daughter assembled these poems. In some ways, the order reflects what she saw her father's life and her hopeful belief that he became more empathetic at the end of his life.

Tell the truth, are you Raymond?

I hope not. Who we are and what we are really like is best told by those who love us. Ask my children, especially my youngest daughter.

You say in your preface that none of your characters resemble real people and none of the events described in the book ever happen. Yet you call this a true story. How can that be?

This goes to the heart of the book. As it developed, I realized that I was trying to tell a story not by a simple first or third person narrative, but by the emotions, perceptions and reactions to experiences of the characters.

 If I ask you "what did you do today?" You will say, "I got up slowly,  ate breakfast, was late for work but got there before the boss noticed." But what you experienced was not just those factual events. No one stood behind you saying, "You're up, you are eating, you are rushing to work..."

What you experienced was more like: sleepy....awake...disoriented....hungry... full...anxious... scared....relieved." In fact, it might be more accurate to tell a story about a knight who awakens from a witch's spell, shakes his hunger with food from a basket left by fleeing peasants, thinks himself in a strange kingdom where he does battle with a fire-snorting dragon with a great glass eye, who he vanquishes without realizing that he is in the present and he has done battle with a bus.

 Of course that is a silly story that has nothing to do with what actually "happened" but is it really like what you experienced in many ways?

 Cliché alert: I am asking for your definition of truth.

Would you call this book experimental?  I am thinking here of some of the work published in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith.  Your book makes exciting use of typography in portraying the worlds of father and daughter.

 When I hear that word, I think of a confusing, boring, book that is either academic or downright impossible to understand. I hope this book is fun, accessible and worthwhile whether or not the reader "gets" what I am trying to do.

 As I assembled poetry for a new book, I kept feeling that something was missing and that there should be more than just poems. One day, I remembered the Talmud and it mushroomed from there.

In the case of your book, I’m sure your realize that from the process form initial manuscript to finished product was not a quick one.  We went through many edits and back and forth exchanges in terms of content and format.  Would you please comment on the revision aspect of editing and publishing?

This book was in many ways a collaborative effort, which is how the editorial process should work. After talking to you and seeing your comments, I rethought the format (there were four elements at one time, instead of three) and at a couple of points, had to ask myself what I was really trying to do. Even when I disagreed, rethinking and responding to challenge made it a better book. 

Part of the challenge was the fact that the format demanded synchronization of poems, stories and narratives. I didn't want them to be too close. I did not want the narrative to explain the corresponding poem or what was going on as one or the other was written. Remember that this is L. assembling her father's work and her own and I didn't want it to look contrived. Nevertheless, when a poem was deleted or replaced, I often had to reorganize the narratives and stories around it.

 I have to tell you a funny story. Just as I thought I was done, about 6 months ago, I read a book on Maxwell Perkins, the Scribners editor who guided Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Lardner and others. While I didn't fancy myself one of those guys, reading about the torturous rewrites, and passionate arguments made me feel terribly guilty. I put the book away for a month, came back to it and dropped, moved or revised 30% of what I thought was perfect. 

Emily Dickinson is dead.  We can’t sit back and assume that even after we cease to be, someone will pull poems from our dresser drawers and gift them to the world.  How important do you think social media and marketing is to the poet today?

 It depends on what the poet wants. Once again, I'll turn to the book. If we want to be Raymond and put our work in drawers, then we deserve what we get out of it. If we care enough to want to share, if we want to be really serious about doing our best, then having it read is important. 

Sure, you can get carried away. I detest social media and marketing my work sometimes feels degrading. But when I read to an appreciative audience, I can see what works and what doesn't and really hear myself for the first time. When someone I don't know writes to me or stops by a reading and gives me feedback, I feel less like a strange little man hiding away scribbling and more like an artist true to both his craft and his humanity. OK, that was inflated, but if we don't get our work out there we risk being Raymond.

Now, Barry, what next?  Do you have thoughts about what directions you want your writing to take?  

Of course, I have a couple of dozen new poems, one or two of which are pretty good. ( You know, the book contains less than 10% of what I wrote during the period since my prior book was published). I may do another book of poetry in a couple of years.

I'm still toying with the idea of a book that combines poetry with experience/commentary/prose - perhaps more directly related than DBZ and more Talmudic. It would take a lot of work and I would want a serious, action-heavy plot. I have the first chapters and/or outlines of several novels I never got around to.

On the other hand, I'm working on a chapbook of minimalist, visual and funny very short poems. Really stupid stuff. I may let that part of my brain take over for a while!

An Interview with Philip Kolin

Departures Cover

The following interview with Philip C. Kolin was conducted in early October shortly after the publication of Departures. Kolin is The University Distinguished Professor with the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he also edits The Southern Quarterly.

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BH:     This is not your first published collection of poems. How does Departures relate to your earlier books such as Deep Wonder (2000) or Reading God's Handwriting (2012)?

PCK:   Much of my earlier work is rooted in "the poetry of faith." Deep Wonder was described as a collection of lyric poems that could be prayed; and in fact, several reviewers linked these poems thematically to the Psalms. Reading God's Handwriting was much more contemplative, modeled on Lectio Divina, or the sacred ritual of reading, meditating, and applying Scripture. Though more secular, the poems in Departures still concentrate on issues of belief whether of self, others, or creation.

BH:     You write a lot about historical figures and events in this collection. How are they part of your idea of "departures"?

PCK:   I have always been fascinated by historical poetry and have been working on two collections of poems grounded in history, one of the them about the savage murder of Emmett Till in 1955 and the other, tentatively entitled Pilsen Snow, about my old Czech American neighborhood on the near south side of Chicago. As Sir Philip Sidney proclaimed, a poet surpasses both the historian and the philosopher in gaining access to the truth. In Departures there is no question that the large arc of history provides a journey for famous and unknown heroes to travel. Accordingly, I have included poems about FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, Enrico Fermi, Mother Teresa, Kate Hepburn, etc. as well as poems about individuals whose voices may otherwise never have been heard—my cousin who was killed on the last day of World War II, my grammar school piano teacher, a prayerful Chicago secretary who can "almost see the Beatific Vision" from her office window on the seventh floor of the Merchandise Mart.

 BH:    Why did you select the title of Departures?

PCK:   Each of the poems tells a story about a journey the speaker takes and so the word “departures” struck me as a wonderfully expansive one to announce and group the poems. The journeys in Departures can be chronological, familial, romantic, and/or spiritual. The titles of the four sections into which the book is divided give readers signposts to the types of journeys the poems explore—"Childhood Encores" (both the happy memories and the traumatic ones), "Women and Men in/out of Love" (from the exhilarating joy of discovery to the dread of failure) to "Obsequies" (laments whether for the endangerment of a species, the ravages of Katrina, the loss of a spouse) to "Revelation" (the existential dread of being severed from life as well as flowering the garden within). One reviewer remarked that the poems in Departures are revelations in themselves.

BH:     But as I read Departures I also find a lot of humor, or am I misreading the collection?

PCK:   No, you are on target. There is a comic strain that runs through some of the poems, particularly in, say, "Sister Veritas" about my grammar school principal or "Why I Majored in English." This latter poem has the most humorous line in Departures: "I majored in English/ to learn how to be polite/ in front of cats."

BH:     I get a strong sense of place in your poems. Would you comment on this.

PCK:   I do include many descriptions of landscapes in Departures (one has to travel from somewhere), but place for me has both a geographic and symbolic address. The four geographies, if you will, that resonate in Departures reflect my own experiences. I was born, bred, and educated in Chicago (all three of my degrees are from Chicago universities) and so the urban Midwest is here, including my old neighborhood of Pilsen where Mayor Cermak and Kim Novak hailed from.  But for the last 4 decades I have lived in the South and have inhaled the perfume of Southern muses. So there is a long prose poem about New Orleans, several poems about Panama City Beach and Florida's Emerald Coast, and poems, too, about the people and places of Mississippi that have nurtured me.

BH:     What writers have influenced you the most?

PCK:   Unquestionably, Scriptural voices sound throughout Departures. And so do those of Dante and the Metaphysical poets. But there are also poems here about Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Samuel Beckett, all of whom have had a strong pull on me. There are other voices, too, less declarative but nonetheless formative such as Whitman, Frost, and even that rascal Allen Ginsburg whom I met once at Jimmy's Bar and Tap at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. There are also a couple of movies that triggered poems such as Schindler’s List for the long poem “Passover in the Camps.”

BH:     What did you think of Megan Cary's cover?

PCK:   It is stirring, haunting, and evocative of the entire collection. The patina of colors Megan chose symbolizes the earthly and the spiritual, the worlds of the poems, at once.  Megan is a genius and thanks to Sue Walker, a superlative editor by the way, I had a chance to have an extended conversation with Megan about the collection, and we also had lots of follow up, which is not the case with many presses. The indefinite figure traveling the long, rocky path toward an unknown destination, both clouded and (paradoxically) illuminated, strikes me as emblematic of the Keatsian mystery that undergirds Negative Capability Press.

BH:     Any advice for aspiring poets?

PCK:   It takes more than a “fine frenzy rolling” to write a poem. I am not discounting inspiration; in fact, I celebrate it, but being a poet means paying careful attention to people, places, and events, being a researcher, engaging in mind-bending revisions, many of them, and studying space the way an artist or architect would. Poems are more than words; they are visual creations whose shape and size must coalesce with the verbal. Enjambments, stanza breaks, punctuation (I love the work that dashes and hyphens do)—all shape a poem.

BH:     Finally, any plans to write a sequel to Departures titled Arrivals?

PCK:   Why not? After all, every departure ends with some type of arrival.

An interview with Megan Cary

Megan Cary

SW: Megan, I want to start in the beginning – that beginning when I was introduced to Claire Evangelista.  John Chambers, and I had just finished editing the poems for Whatever Remembers Us: An Anthology of Alabama Literature, and I had a few pictures that my son Jason had taken when we stopped in Montgomery on returning from a trip.  I had asked Claire who might design this book and she told me about you. 

Whatever Remembers Us Cover, 2007

You were finishing your undergraduate studies at the University of South Alabama.  Claire said:  “Megan Cary is creative and talented and great to work with. You will work well together" – and indeed that came to pass.  We’ve been editing and publishing together now for over seven years.

Was this anthology your first nationally designed book?  And what were your thoughts about this adventure?

MC: Yes it was. Actually, because I was an undergraduate design student at the time, it was really my first “official” design job ever for an actual client. I was very excited and nervous. I wanted to do well and create something beautiful that you, the authors and the readers would be pleased with.

SW: Since that auspicious beginning, you have been an integral part of Negative Capability.  Thanks to Claire and to Fate, Wyre, or Providence – and especially my gratitude to you Megan.  And thank you for designing our fabulous website.  But let’s introduce a backstory.  Tell us about your interest in art and about you chose art as a career. 

MC: For me, there has never really been any other option than art. My earliest memories are sitting with my grandfather at his desk and drawing with him. He was a pastor by trade, but he was also an amazing artist and would spend hours teaching me to draw animals and people while he worked on his sermons.

Megan, age 3, and her grandfather, Rev. Noah E. Johns

In addition to his lessons, my mother enrolled me in art classes through the Community Activities program from a very early age. In fact, I was too young for the more advanced courses but I looked older and was past the point of stick figures. We may or may not have stretched the truth a bit to get me in the better classes.

Computers, from an early age, also fascinated me. I got my first Apple computer around the age of four. I was using a rudimentary form of design software, “Print Shop,” all through my youth, making signs and banners. I guess if you think about it a certain way, I’ve always been a designer. It was a natural career choice, to combine both my love of computers and art when I graduated from high school.

SW: What did you do after your graduation from the University of South Alabama?

MC: After I graduated, I was lucky enough to immediately get a job with Crown Products, a national supplier of promotional products. I was a designer in their marketing department and created ads, catalogs, websites, managed their social media, and even tried my hand at designing bags and drink-ware. I eventually became a Senior Creative with the company before leaving. I will forever be grateful for the opportunities they provided to me; it was a great learning experience, and I made some wonderful friends.

SW: What I always love is stories – the way certain things happen.  One of my special memories is the publication of Alexis Saunders' two books, especially the last one when you and I drove to Tampa, Florida to put the book in Alexis' hands.  Alexis was a talented young writer who turned to poetry after being diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.  She had given up her job in editing in New York City and returned home to Florida.  Alexis’s mother and I had been good friends and travelled the nine months of pregnancy together; we went to the same doctor and delivered our babies within a month of each other.  Alexis and my twin sons played together until my move to Mobile, Alabama when the children were two.  Stephanie, Alexis’s mother and I kept up with each other through the years – and when Alexis was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, she asked if she could participate in my poetry class blog.  She was a dedicated and passionate participant – and I asked Alexis if we could publish her poetry book.  We ended up publishing two before Alexis passed away. I was impressed, Megan, with your compassion – and the way you shared my vision of making Negative Capability more than just a means of getting a book into print – namely that of making Negative Capability a home-place for authors, a place where publishing is a shared experience of mutual respect and love.

MC: Thank you Sue, Alexis meant a lot to me. All of the authors I design for do, even though they may not realize it. But Alexis will always have a special place in my heart. She was so strong, compassionate and loving – and extremely talented. I think of her and her family often and miss her very much.

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Alexis Saunders

Obituary - Alexis Morgan Saunders (Died March 7, 2010)
Saunders, Alexis Morgan, 34, passed away in the loving arms of her mother on March 7, 2010 after battling brain cancer for almost five years. Alexis was born in Tampa and graduated from Berkeley Preparatory School in 1993 and Vanderbilt University in 1997…read the full obituary

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SW: And so you're off to Graduate School. What has your MFA meant to you?

MC: It meant a great deal to me. I was accepted to Savannah College of Art and Design’s graduate program, which was both exciting and daunting. SCAD is a top-ranked design school, which means that the professors and students expect nothing short than the best of out of each other. There were a lot of tears, sleepless nights, and times I questioned my abilities. In the end though, I came out a better designer because I was surrounded and challenged by peers just as passionate about design as I was.

SW: And now you are an Assistant Professor at the University of Mobile. What do you teach? You said you love teaching. Talk a bit about that.

MC: I have always loved learning. The pursuit of knowledge is incredibly important to me, and I realized that I wanted to share that enthusiasm with others. I have been tasked with creating the graphic design program in the Art Department at the University of Mobile. I primarily teach design related classes, though a drawing or painting may be thrown in every once in awhile, which I enjoy.

The best part is that I get to sit down with my students every day, just as my grandfather sat down with me, and share what I’ve learned. I love the University of Mobile because our small classes allow me to give individual attention to each and every student and because of that, we are building a small but mighty community of passionate, talented future designers.

SW: Your book covers, Megan, are amazing.  In fact, you have been called a genius.  What are two or three of your favorite covers – and what about their evolution?

Thank you, but I think genius might be overstating it a bit. I will say that I believe the fact that I’m an avid reader and I always read the work before I design, gives the covers I make more meaning and impact. It’s hard to pick two of my favorite covers. But if I had to narrow it down, the first would be for Barry Mark’s Sounding.

Sounding cover, 2012

Barry wanted to include a picture of his daughter, who died in a tragic automobile accident and a photograph of a sculpture she had made for him. I struggled with how to incorporate these two in a harmonious manner. After much thought, I realized that what the cover needed was exactly the opposite. It needed to be fractured and broken, like the author’s world after his daughter passed away. What I created was raw and, to be frank, uncomfortable. I was very apprehensive sending it to both you and Barry. I was very relieved when the feedback was positive.

My most recent favorite cover is for Rob Gray’s Jesus Walks the Southland. Rob’s book touches on some sensitive topics in the South – religion, race and politics. Rob had a lot of ideas that he shared with me for the cover, one in particular was the idea of having a Jesus-like figure walking down a country road.  I tried this several times and again, it was almost too comfortable for such powerfully questioning material. I merged this idea with the idea of baptism, renewal, purification and transformation. I think it worked well.

Jesus Walks the Southland cover, 2014

SW: Anything I haven’t asked that you would like to mention?

MC: Just that I would like to thank you Sue, for the opportunity that you have given me. Over the last seven years I’ve had a chance to design over twenty books for the press and gain invaluable knowledge about the publishing industry. Also, I’ve made a wonderful friend.  

An Interview with Lissa Kiernan

Lissa Kiernan

Let’s say we’re sitting at a café in Brooklyn. Let’s say we’re drinking café au lait – and we’re talking about writing, about your new book: Two Faint Lines In The Violet – just out from Negative Capability Press. 

SBW:  Let’s begin in the beginning:  when did you start writing poetry – and what in your background led you to believe that you were a poet?

When I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan, enrolled as a flute performance major, I took a modern poetry course to fulfill a humanities requirement, discovered Yeats, and fell in love.

Both of my parents were artists, my mother a pianist and my father a photographer. I remember they gave me a poetry collection by Stanley Kunitz for a birthday in my early teens. Kunitz says that both gardening and writing poetry depend on the "wild permissiveness of the inner life" but I didn’t give myself that permission for a long time because, in addition to being an introvert, I resisted the negative stereotypes associated with poets. Narcissistic, depressive, neurotic, pretentious? That couldn’t be me! LOL….

I still prefer to call myself a writer who writes poetry, rather than a poet, since I also write essays and short stories.

SBW:  Place:  How has the sense of place played a role in your writing?

The abbreviated version: sorry, there is no abbreviated version. Place has played a tremendous role in this collection of poems. Here's how:

My father was diagnosed with cancer in 2003 and died from complications of his brain tumor four months later. During one of his three protracted hospital stays, he announced, apropos of nothing, “I’m not trying to be Erin Brockovich, but did you know that my closest neighbor also has a brain tumor?” I couldn't unhear that.

So I started doing some research and discovered that, in February 1997, under pressure from local watchdog group Citizens Awareness Network (CAN), the Massachusetts Department of Public Health had conducted a health study of the area where my father lived. Referred to locally as the Hill Towns, the cluster of eleven small, economically-depressed communities in the Berkshire foothills, including Charlemont, were chosen due to their location downriver from Yankee Rowe Atomic, one representing the greatest opportunity for exposure to the plant’s air emissions. Despite a dizzying array of disclaimers, the study—Assessment of Cancer Incidence and Down Syndrome Prevalence in the Deerfield River Valley, Massachusetts—nevertheless found statistically significant elevations in breast cancer, Down Syndrome, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the type of cancer my father had.

So there was this splintering disconnect between the lush, idyllic landscape where he lived, and this invisible, toxic threat that loomed around it. That feeling of the beautiful-terrible, the fortunate hazard, informs the first half of my poetry collection.

After he died, I finally gave myself full permission to write poetry. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but a need, moving my hand across the page, working its way through my grief.

Awhile later, I did make a conscious decision to pursue honing my craft when I enrolled in a workshop with Amy King at Poet’s House. Called “Making the Urban Poetic,” Amy posited that poetry was mutable enough to inherit the distinctive attributes of the cities in which its authors lived, and I play with that idea in the second half of my collection. These are poems more or less written from the point of view of a country mouse coming of age in, and coming to terms with, living in New York City, specifically Brooklyn, pre-gentrification.

SBW:  On poetry, in prose, in writing in general – maybe stories and plays, what formal devices – repetition, permutation, poetic forms such as prose poems, sonnets, villanelles, etc. are a part of your poetic repertoire? 

A lot of internal rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and awareness of meter and/or breath. Thanks to my early infusion in music (my mother was a piano teacher), my ear is pretty well-attuned to hearing harmonics and my heart fastened to pulse. Two Faint Lines in the Violet is primarily free verse, but includes several pantoums, two ghazals, a triolet, and a blues poem.

SBW:  In many ways your poetry is daring; you address the political ramifications of nuclear power plants and the sexuality of your father, how do you steel yourself to tell knotty, even dangerous truths about our human “being.”

One poem at a time. LOL. Seriously, though, it took what felt like forever before I began to find the words to disclose—even to myself—that I was writing poems that were also a form of investigative journalism into nuclear power. I was concerned that people would think I’d gone mad with grief, looking for someone or anything to blame.

However, by exercising due diligence and educating myself about the history of nuclearism, specifically that of Yankee Rowe, I began, tentatively, writing documentary poems about the energy plant, and, separately, elegiac poems about my father. Then it took yet another, steelier steeling, to write the poem that attempted to connect the dots, one that implicated Yankee Rowe, so to speak, as the scene of the crime.

As for my father’s sexuality, and other such "knotty" truths, that was somewhat less daunting. My father came out when I was 17, after twenty years of marriage and three children, and as shattering as it was at the time (1979, which was just before Rock Hudson's death brought about public awareness of AIDS) ultimately, his courage led to greater intimacy between us. Putting my own personal truths out there took a lot more nerve.

SBW:  Please explain duende – and its role in your poetry.

Sure...so speaking of personal truths, duende is a type of muse, though not the beatific, benign one we usually envision. It’s the muse that comes to interrogate us, to terrorize, to torture us into confession, to write the poems we're most afraid to write, the poems that might kill us in the process of writing them. Not all of my poems result from dancing with the duende, but I think some of the best ones do, such as “Census,” which I ended up making into an audiopoem. Other poems in the collection that are very duende is “Erratum, Last Line, Final Stanza” and "Dog Days."

SBW:  Who are your literary influences – poetry, fiction, nonfiction?

Poetry: Almost too many to name, both “the greats” as well as contemporaries. As for the greats: WB Yeats, Muriel Rukeyser, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman . . .

Fiction: Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham…

Nonfiction: Lewis Thomas, Rebecca Solnit, Anaïs Nin, Susan Griffin, Susan Sontag . . .

Playwriting: Samuel Beckett, David Mamet . . . Shakespeare! Hmmm. I notice that I can't list any women in this category.

SBW:  I notice in reading a number of Paris Review interviews which I enjoy and that serve as models for written interviews, many are of male writers.  Eavan Boland speaks of the influence of male writers, especially Yeats and Joyce.  Are women occupying a more viable position of influence in American literature today?

I am optimistic for the increased purview of women writers in American literature, though the numbers show that women are still underrepresented, not that we need numbers for confirmation. In my experience, women feel sexism and misogyny’s effects, however recessive and insidious, in and out of the literary arena, just about every day.

For me, the best way to counteract all that and stay positive is simply to keep writing, to keep trying to write better, to win better, to fail better (Beckett) to keep submitting, to keep mentoring and encouraging other women writers. I’m also heartened by the interest and admiration for women writers among many of my male friends, poets and non-poets, who readily self-identify as feminists.  

But in Ireland, Boland’s turf, and where I studied for two residencies during my MFA program, I gather it’s still a lamentable situation, though she and her contemporaries—Sinéad Morrissey, Medbh McGuckian, Claire Keegan—to name a few, are throwing down the gauntlet. Morrissey won the TS Elliot prize last year, for instance, and was just named the inaugural poet laureate of Belfast. So there’s hope, which makes me happy as an Irish-American woman.

SBW:  I know that you run a fabulous Poetry Cooperative, “The Rooster Moans.”  Tell us about it – how it began, what it does, and please mention The Poetry Barn.

Thank you, Sue! As a web developer by day and writer by night, creating a private, online space for writers to converse and share drafts of their work seemed like a perfect fit. The idea came to fruition when I was the poetry editor for Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal. Each Lobster author received an invitation to join The Rooster Moans, where I led ad-hoc online poetry workshops. So our community was already writing at a very high level; Susan Yount, Maureen Alsop, Brenda Mann Hammack, and Chris Crittenden, all fierce poets, were early adopters. Soon, they offered to "give back" by leading workshops of their own. I recruited more fabulous teaching artists, and after obtaining my MFA, took The Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative public.

Now we offer up to three workshops every month, free to gently-priced, on a wide range of themes: magic realism, ecopoetics, objectivist poetry, confessional poetry, ekphrastic poetry, the grotesque, the prose poem, the fairy tale poem, nuclear poetics, poems influenced by film, oulipo, conceptualism . . .the list goes on and on. I’m incredibly grateful to our teaching artists and our “moaners,” as we fondly refer to the poets who enroll in our workshops, many of whom are regulars, for their steadfast support.

Our next step is to find a physical space in which to hold in-person workshops, retreats, readings, and residencies. I envision a generous number of acres in New York’s Catskill Mountains, and am actively looking for our home, the centerpiece of which will be an eco-friendly barn made from boards branded with poetry! I’m super excited for this next phase, and our supporters have been enthusiastically cheering us along.

SBW:  What else would you like to say about writing / writers?

Someone once told me: if you can do anything else, do it! And that's not half-bad advice for anyone on the fence about writing. It's such hard work. But its rewards—self-knowledge, empathy, self-respect, love—for me, at least, dwarf the energy expended to reap them.

And for those wondering if you are cut out to be poet, I promise you’ll eventually know, instinctively, just as you know your own name. Because like family, you don’t choose poetry, it chooses you. And when you accept that, and all that kin demands, you’ll finally, ironically, arrive at a complex peace—simultaneously more energized and exhausted than you ever thought possible. Welcome home.