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Number
289
January February March 2002
Coming Out the
Other Side
Talking with
Kim Addonizio
LEZA LOWITZ
Copyright
© 2002 Poetry Flash
In 2000, San Francisco poet Kim Addonizio was
named a finalist in the National Book Awards for
her latest collection of poetry, Tell Me.
Her books of poems include The Philosopher's
Club and Jimmy & Rita (all from BOA
Editions); her book of short stories is In the
Box Called Pleasure (Fiction Collective 2); and
she co-authored, with Dorianne Laux, The Poet's
Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing
Poetry (W.W. Norton). Forthcoming in the fall is
Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattos on Writers,
Writers on Tattoos, co-edited with Cheryl
Dumesnil (Warner Books). Kim Addonizio's honors
include two National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowships, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and
the Pushcart Prize; her poems have appeared widely,
from American Poetry Review, The Paris
Review, and Threepenny Review to
Chick-Lit. And her previous occupations have
included waitress, tennis instructor, Kelly Girl,
attendant for the disabled, and auto parts store
bookkeeper. She now teaches private writing
workshops and is on the faculty of Goddard
College's low-residence MFA Program. This
conversation took place at the poet's home in San
Francisco, shortly after the gala National Book
Awards Ceremony in New York City, November 2000.
---Editors
LEZA LOWITZ: You've published three
books of poetry (including a novel in verse), a
book of short stories, and a book on the art and
craft of writing poetry; that's five books in the
past six years. This year, you were a finalist in
the 2000 National Book Awards for your new poetry
collection, Tell Me. Is this an "overnight
success" twenty years in the making?
KIM ADDONIZIO: Exactly. That's how
long I've been seriously writing, almost twenty
years. It's been a great year, and a lot has
happened.
LEZA LOWITZ: What was it like, being a
finalist for the National Book Award?
KA: It was great. I was stunned.
When Neil Baldwin, the Executive Director of the
National Book Foundation, called me and said, "Your
book has been selected," I said, "What does that
mean?" It was so inconceivable. I knew BOA had
nominated me, as well as Lucille Clifton [who
received the award for Blessing the
Boats]. I was really grateful that they
nominated me, because I knew it cost $100. And I
thought that meant BOA must believe in this book. I
was gratified that my publisher believed in my work
and thought it was a good book. That was great. And
then to actually become a finalist was amazing to
me.
LL: …and it must have been
wonderful to be in the company of the other
[nominated] poets…(Clifton, Galway
Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Bruce Smith).
KA: Yes! And I was gratified
again, because I thought, "Wow. My work spoke to
these people. Something happened. They thought
enough of it to do that." That was just amazing to
me. And also, I was surprised because of the
subject matter of this book, because it is so 'out
there' in some ways. I think of the National Book
Awards as mainstream success and mainstream
recognition, and I was kind of surprised that my
book about drinking and lost love and suffering and
all the rest of it would actually be considered for
something like that.
LL: It was a great moment. It
was great to be there. But let's backtrack a bit.
Can you talk about how you started writing?
KA: I started writing in my
twenties, when I started reading poetry for the
first time, and something happened. It was that
"taking the top of your head off" thing that Emily
Dickinson talks about. I think I read some Sylvia
Plath, and I felt that way, and didn't know why,
and I started writing poems almost out of
nowhere.
LL: Did you also start writing fiction
at that time?
KA: No, I started writing fiction
about four or five years later. It took me a lot
longer to get anywhere with fiction. I'm still
trying to figure that out. I'm trying to understand
what makes a story, to understand the structure of
a story. And I still don't think I do, but
sometimes I get lucky and manage to write a story
that works. I think I know my way around a poem a
lot better. When I'm writing a poem, I have a sense
of the structure, and I have a sense of whether
it's working or not. It's a lot harder for me to
intuit the structure of a story, where it needs to
go, what needs to happen next.
LL: Talking about structure, you write
a lot of poems in form: pantoums, sonnets, etc.
Given your content, you don't strike me as a poet
who would be attracted to formal poetry.
KA: Well, maybe that's why it's
attractive. There's a kind of tension between
something that's got a formal structure and the
content I'm working with. I'm very attracted to
formal verse because it's a way to put the brakes
on the material; it's very comforting and ordered.
Actually, I think it fits my personality very well,
since I'm somewhat schizophrenic. I have a lot of
chaos in me as well as a great need for order and
structure. Using set forms can be a way to address
that.
LL: So within those structured
parameters, you can explore the chaos…
KA: Yes. And I started out as a
free verse poet, so when I learned about
traditional form I got very interested, since I
didn't know anything about it. It was really
exciting. It changed my language some, and I like
what it does to the imagination. It's actually very
freeing, not constraining at all---for me,
anyway.
LL: Gerald Stern called your poems
"Purgatorial, and elegiac, and unashamed."I really
like that word, purgatorial. I wondered if you had
any thoughts about that.
KA: Well, I've never thought about
that comment, "purgatorial."Actually, it makes me
think of a line from Dante's Inferno, about
how it's the fate of the souls in limbo to live
without hope---but with desire. So maybe in that
sense, it's purgatorial. Not complete hopelessness
or complete despair. But there again, there's a
kind of tension between the impossible and the
desire for something, anyway.
LL: You seem to bump up against
that duality in your writing, through the actions
of your characters or the persona of the poet, or
the subject matter. You're going right into the
fire, right into the dark side, right into the pain
and suffering. But there's always some sense of
hope, the sense that if I could only hang on,
someone will come rescue me, or I'll rescue myself.
There seems to be an aspect of bravery in your
poetry. You're really going into the dark subject
matter of sexuality, of women's bodies and men's
bodies, and in a way, it's kind of a purification.
By going into the fire, into the inferno, you're
able to come out to the other side. Of
light.
KA: That's great. That's a great
comment. I should be interviewing you. Tell me
about my work, Leza.…(laughs).
LL: What I was going to ask you is:
what is your subject matter?
KA: Love, death, suffering,
desire. What it is for all poets, I think. Just
consciousness, being alive on the planet, in a
body. I think that's pretty much the range of my
concerns. In a way that's very narrow, but in
another way what else is there: food? That too
comes under desire.
LL: I love the line in your poem "The
Numbers" from Tell Me, where the poem is
basically a list of desires, sort of an
incantation. "How many days / are left of my life,
how much does it matter if I manage to say / one
true thing about it---" That is the most beautiful
line in the book, and to me one of the most
powerful lines you've written.
KA: Thanks. Well, we all feel that
way, right? Those of us who write.
LL: Yes. And I felt that
there's more of a sense in your recent book of the
poet allowing the poems to be; there's not the
self-consciousness of some of the earlier work.
Maybe it has to do with some of your subject
matter---growing older, and looking back on history
with the poem about your grandfather, or looking
forward, with the poems about your daughter.
There's more of a continuity, a sense of giving up
the struggle.
KA: I think that's true. I think I
found my voice, as they say. I hadn't quite found
it in The Philosopher's Club. I still was
outside it, in a way. They were early poems, when I
was learning to write. It was my first book. And
then Jimmy & Rita was something very
different. I don't know how to put that into the
continuum. But in the meantime, while I was doing
that very focused work on Jimmy & Rita,
I was also writing other poems and continuing to
learn where my territory was and how I could talk
about it. And I feel that I found that by the time
I got to Tell Me.
LL: Was there any particular way you
were able to do that? Or was it just through the
process of writing itself?
KA: Yes, I think it was just
through the process of writing.
LL: Who are some of your
influences? Not necessarily just
poets…
KA: I love Keats; I love Whitman.
Contemporary writers like Jack Gilbert and C.K.
Williams. I go back to Elizabeth Bishop a lot. The
early Chinese and Japanese poets in translation
were really important to me because of the kind of
simplicity that at least came through in the
translations. The simplicity and clarity, with
complexity, was important to me. Obviously, my art
is not a very hermetic one.
LL: No, but there is definite
starkness to your work, which is very difficult to
obtain since the work seems to be very
autobiographical.…I wanted to ask you about
alcohol. Many of your poems and stories deal with
addiction and obsession, and alcohol seems to play
a big role in them. Let me quote Billy Collins, who
said that your poems are "intensified versions of
the barroom ballad." Do you agree with
that?
KA: Well, I kind of like the idea
of a book of poetry as a jukebox that you choose a
tune on.
LL: I don't know if that's what
he meant. Do you think that's what he
meant?
KA: No, I think he's talking about
songs of lost love. And loss is certainly a
compelling factor.
LL: You write in "Reading
Sontag," your deconstructivist story, "Themes so
far: loss of power; loss of memory; self-hatred;
definitions."What is powerful about this is that
you have a sense of being both inside and outside
the work. You have that with your poems, too. Even
though they seem to be autobiographical, there is a
sense of the poet's hand at work, the poet's
knowledge of her situation, just as in that story,
you play with being outside the structure and
commenting on the content.
KA: I think that, in a way, all
artists' work is autobiographical. Any writer's
work is a map of their psyche. You can really see
what their concerns are, what their obsessions are,
and what interests them. I got really intrigued by
writers like Kathy Acker who were using
autobiography like that, writers who take that
material and exploit it in some way. Writers who
use forms such as diaries, letters, and so-called
confession, to turn that inside out and play with
it. I am interested in that in my fiction,
especially, in trying to play with the levels of
truth and experience and symbolic experience. This
is what language is---we are creating symbols for
some disturbance inside of us, and finding a way to
cast it out there, in some sense, in order to get
our experience outside of ourselves. In order to
look at it in some way, to deal with it. I talked
about this with Mark Doty as well, when I
interviewed him for the Flash. And back to
your question about alcohol, I think that's part of
what I was doing with that, really wanting to
examine it, to look at it. I have a great impulse
toward self-destruction, and a great impulse toward
self-improvement.
LL: It's good that you have both. Is
writing a sort of curative act for you?
KA: Definitely. If I didn't have
writing, I really might succumb to something. I
don't know what, but something.
LL: But you're always teetering
on the edge, it seems. Or maybe you're not, maybe
that's just the persona you adopt in your
writing.
KA: Like anything, it's true, and
it's not true. There are certainly days I'm
teetering on the edge. Who isn't?
LL: Let's call it a
half-truth.
KA: I'm pretty grounded. My house
isn't falling apart. I've raised a beautiful kid.
I've got a lucky life, with friends and loves and
work I have a passion for, so I feel extremely
lucky. Of course, I think of the Gerald Stern poem
that begins, "Lucky life isn't one long string of
horrors/and there are moments of peace and pleasure
as I lie between the blows."
LL: There's that wonderful line
in your poem, "Aliens": "Now that you're finally
happy / you notice how sad your friends
are."
KA: Yes, well that was after a
period of real grief over my second marriage. And
then finally starting to get past that.
LL: Do you consider yourself a
feminist, or "post-feminist" as your publisher's
literature says?
KA: Do I go with what my publisher
said about me? Yes, absolutely, I'm a feminist.
LL: How does that jibe with
your work?
KA: I think a lot of time my work
explores issues of empowerment. How else does it
jibe with my work? Tell me, Leza (laughs).
LL: (laughs) I don't know. But
I'm going to quote you from the title story of
In the Box Called Pleasure. "Suddenly I was
just fucking a male body, not his body, and I felt
a sense of freedom and power: now I could fuck
anyone, do anything, create my own life." It seems
to me that sex is really used as a kind of conduit,
as a way for the women to find their source of
power. Is that true? There's a lot of sex in your
writing, but I'm not sure I see a lot of
empowerment.
KA: Well, I said empowerment
issues. I don't think that the women in my work are
necessarily empowered by sex. And I think that's
one of their problems. They think they will be
empowered by sex. It's a way they are looking for
power, and not finding it. I was just thinking
about that this morning, about sex as power, and
writing as power, and ways to take power. I was
thinking about this on a personal level, because I
grew up with a lot of powerlessness, and it just
occurred to me today that sex is this way…this
apparent way… to gain power, and writing is
another way. Really a lot of things are about that
struggle to empower yourself.
LL: Is writing an addiction?
KA: Hmmm. That's a great question.
Probably, but a good one.
LL: Is there such a thing as a good
addiction?
KA: I think so. Maybe, ultimately,
the enlightened state is not to want any of this or
need any of this. I don't know. But in terms of a
response, I think writing is a healthy
response.
LL: In your story, "Reading
Sontag,"You write: "Literature's supposed to take
the moral high ground. To be beautiful. To
instruct. To cast out one's personal demons. To
revel in one's neurotic self-obsession."Whose
definition is that? Is that your
definition?
KA: Well, I was playing with those
lines, appropriating hers and then considering a
few alternative definitions. The opening part is
from Sontag's essay, "The Pornographic
Imagination," which talks about the way some
literature uses the structures of pornography. It
discusses Georges Bataille and some other writers.
She's making the point that taking the moral high
ground is not necessarily what literature is about.
And the whole reaction against so-called
pornographic literature partly comes from that, the
idea that literature is supposed to be moral. But
of course, what is moral?
LL: Have you had internal censors
about being able to be forthright in your subject
matter?
KA: I suppose I've had them, but
I've rolled over them. That's been my aim. Usually,
if I am afraid of something, I try to go towards
it. I make myself do it, and ask myself, "what is
this about?" That's what I do in my work. What I've
had to do in my work. I think I couldn't have
written otherwise. I think again, going back to
Kathy Acker, that she's really a writer who
influenced me both in my fiction and also in the
recognition that I could write anything. I thought,
"Wow, she puts this stuff down. And there really
aren't any barriers to what you can write."That was
very freeing for me.
LL: Right. Her writing is at turns
destructive, violent, sad, tragic, graphic,
appropriating right and left; all of these things
we're told we're not supposed to do and be. Towards
the end of her life, she tried to approach her
cancer as a creative rather than a destructive
force. She'd never been pregnant, and spoke of the
tumor as something growing inside of her. The idea
of struggling to embrace this invasive, violent,
destructive force as a creative force!
KA: Yes, it's really
interesting.
LL: There aren't that many women who
are writing about sitting in bars, or poets who are
really describing that experience. I was touched by
the line in "One-Night Stands" about how all the
men in your life are gone, but the bars where you
met them remain. The bar is sort of an envelope in
a way, a structure. It could be seen as a frame for
the experience, a structure in a way that form
might be a structure in a poem. I loved the way
that the glass, too, is a vessel: In your poem,
"Glass" it ultimately "gives back the drinker's own
face." That was almost like the Zen koan: "Show me
your face before your parents were born." To me, it
was a metaphor, the glass as mirror…who you
become when you drink, who you are, your
essence.
KA: Bars fascinate me. The whole
subculture. It's so much a part of our culture, and
it's so accepted. On the one hand, you have the
Happy Hour side of things, of conviviality and
getting together with your friends and having a
drink. Then you've got the six a.m. club, the
people that go in there first thing to have a drink
in order to steady their hand and get through the
day….
LL: Do you need alcohol to write?
There are so many writers throughout history who
have been alcoholics, or didn't call themselves
that, but who drank…
KA: I'm just reading a book about
some American writers who were alcoholics. This
writer's premise, which I think I agree with, is
that they really wrote in spite of the alcohol, and
probably would not have burned out creatively so
early had they not been alcoholics. I don't ever
drink and write. I like to drink coffee and write.
I use alcohol more to slow myself down. And for
most of them, it was really destructive to their
writing. I was just reading about Faulkner, who was
a total mess for the last several years of his
life.
LL: You talked about a balance
between self-destruction and self-improvement. What
is the allure of destruction?
KA: I think it's kind of like
writing in that it's an escape from self. Writing
is a good escape from self, an enlargement of self,
and other things are more of an annihilation.
LL: You escape from yourself in
writing, but on the other hand, you go deeper into
yourself, tap into some truth, some essence. To be
a good writer you need to do that, as you have
done. There's that escape, but also that sense of
return. Otherwise it doesn't resonate. What's your
favorite poem of yours?
KA: The latest one I've written,
always. I just wrote a blues poem--- "Blues for
Robert Johnson." I was really happy with it, and
feel it's a good poem.
LL: Because you just wrote it?
And it's still new?
KA: Yes, because I just wrote
it.
LL: I wanted to ask you about "Virgin
Spring." It's a wonderful poem. Where did it come
from?
KA: I talked about it actually in
Best American Poetry 2000 (Scribner), where
it appeared. I was watching TV one night and the
film "Virgin Spring" came on. And I hadn't seen a
Bergman film since I was about nineteen, when I
thought they were very depressing and boring. But I
started watching it, and I was completely
mesmerized. It was so powerful I had to immediately
write about it. I literally finished watching the
film and just stayed up writing the poem. It came
on at midnight, and lasted until about 1:30, and
then I stayed up another couple of hours writing
the poem. It just hit me so powerfully. The whole
question of good and evil. That's one of my themes,
one of the things I obsess about. Evil and
suffering and power ---all of that. And there it
was.
LL: In the last lines of the
poem [after the two men have raped and killed
the girl and broken bread with her parents, trying
to sell them their murdered daughter's clothing,
and after the father has killed the men to avenge
the daughter] you write: "I don't know what to
make of the sister. She's the one who knows / the
world is brutal / and goes on, scattering seed for
the hogs, the one who says / nothing, the one who
survives." Was that line always a rhetorical
question. Did you write it, "I don't know what to
make of her" originally in that way? It's
chilling.
KA: Yes I did. I think my real
thought was that you have to be brutalized, in a
way, to survive in the world. And that's hard to
deal with. It's almost that we can't afford
innocence, because it is going to be crushed,
somehow. So there is this sister who has seen this,
who has witnessed this, and out of her own
self-preservation, she goes on. It seemed such an
awful thing to me, that that's what you have to do
to survive. You have to know this stuff, and you
have to live with that knowledge in order to
survive.
LL: And she herself looks upon
the scene with a somewhat brutal eye too, in that
she watched the men "erase"the girl, "her
prettiness, her spoiled ways."Those are very honest
things you would say about a sister.
KA: Yes, there's a rivalry
between the sisters.
LL: What I loved about this poem is
that you basically begin by setting the scene,
describing the crime, and in the end, the poem
becomes about the "dark" sister who witnessed it,
who survived. Although the line is " I don't know
what to make of her,"in a way, you do know what to
make of her. You've made a poem of her. It is
really her poem, and that is what its power hinges
on. It's a really masterful poem.
KA: Thank you.
LL: You write a lot about teaching.
Are you teaching now?
KA: Yes, I teach at Goddard, in
the low-residency MFA program. And I teach private
workshops here also. And, you know, I think in a
way it's impossible to teach poetry. But it's
endlessly fascinating.
LL: Everyone says that, it's
impossible. But what does that mean? What's
impossible about it? You've been taught poetry,
haven't you? Or just through the reading of poetry,
you've taught yourself?
KA: I think there is that elusive
element that we call talent. There's also
sensibility that's really important. There are
people who are trying to write poetry that I don't
think have the sensibility. And I'm not talking
about my students here….(laughs). I think you
have to have that sensibility, and then you have to
be able to articulate it, and to do that you need
to learn your craft. There's that other element,
though, and it's mysterious to me. I used to have
more of a sense that I could teach poetry, and now
I feel a lot less that way, even though I teach for
a living. I feel that I can do something, which is
to expose people to writing and give them a chance
to write, and also show them some techniques I've
learned. Whether they are going to be able to put
that all together has nothing to do with me, and
there's no way I can teach them that. It's
something else, and I don't know what it is.
LL: And it's also teaching by example.
The sheer perseverance and force of will that you
have put into your own writing, and your career, is
an example. I'm sure there are many times you've
wanted to give up. Every day, as writers, we have
to find some new reserve, some inspiration. But
basically we have no choice. We have to
write.
KA: Wasn't it Flannery O'Connor
who said, "If you can stop writing, you probably
should."I think there's a lot of truth to that.
It's got to be internal, or you don't persist. I
think that what happens with a lot of people is
that they try it out, or they have this idea that
they want to write, or be writers…
LL: Or have written…
KA: Exactly. It's an ego thing.
It's not coming from the place that's going to get
them anywhere. If it's a true internal need and
desire, you just do it. You do it no matter what.
Maybe it doesn't matter if you get published or if
you get to whatever level of success you think you
need to get to, to validate yourself. What does it
mean anyway to be successful? Emily Dickinson
famously published virtually nothing in her life,
and Whitman self-published. It ultimately doesn't
matter. If you need to do it, you need to do it.
It's a very personal thing; there's a very personal
reason you do it. Some kind of psychic
investigation and excavation, and that's what
motivates you to do it in language or in some form.
So many people now are so aware of the publishing
scene, and the contests and competitions, before
they've really learned their craft. Most of it's
really premature.
LL: But didn't you yourself go through
that? Isn't it a kind of rite of passage?
KA: Sure. And I understand that
impulse, of course. It's good to want to get your
work out there. That's the completion of the
circle, to put it out to someone else. I think of
Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift. He talks about
how the gift has to travel. If it's static, that
doesn't complete the exchange. It has to move. I
think of the poem as the gift, and you serve your
own gift, whatever it is, and then you try to pass
it on to someone else. In the best sense, that is
what the desire to publish is. The flip side of
that is the need for validation, and wavering
self-esteem, and doubt.
LL: In that context, I like the lines
in "The Embers" after the poet has "taught her
wretched poetry class" to poets who were "desperate
to publish…"
KA: "…Though criminally
indifferent / to actual poetry."
LL: Yes, and you write of "how
the Embers [the name of the bar] restored
my faith in the kind of failure that is sufficient
/ unto itself, without requiring the amplifications
of art."
KA: Right.
LL: I love that. The Japanese
have a concept called "The Nobility of Failure."
It's essentially a samurai concept, that if you
sacrifice yourself, failure is in a sense the
highest form of success. It's noble. What does that
mean to you? "[The] kind of failure that is
sufficient / unto itself, without requiring the
amplifications of art." Or perhaps you weren't
talking about writing at all?
KA: No, I think I was. There are
people for whom experience is simply experience,
and that is their life. And they don't feel that
need to make something else of their life. They
don't feel the need to examine it, or turn it
around in any way. Of course, those people aren't
very alive. But sometimes, you know, it gets to be
the overexamined life, and that can be pretty
awful, too.
LL: I like what you said about
"serving your art." I like the idea of writing as a
kind of service, being able to serve a larger
purpose. It does travel, and it does move
people.
KA: Another thing Hyde says is
that the narcissist works to display himself, and
not to suffer change. Maybe that is part of what
you can't teach. You really are writing to suffer
change. And if you are writing to display yourself,
there's a way in which the writing doesn't have as
much depth.
LL: It's interesting in that you do
display yourself, and you are also coming from that
deeper place of desire as a poet to give that gift.
And yet, you also have your photo on the front
cover of Tell Me. You seem to play that edge
of narcissism, or bravado---saying, tell me, show
me, here I am. There's a strength and kind of
showmanship about that, but there's also a real
vulnerability and fragility to the work.
KA: Well, if it's not narcissism,
it's flirting with it. But it comes out of a real
need to be seen. That's one thing that writing does
for me. It helps me to show myself. I'm actually
quite shy!
LL: You are? You're very
exposed in your poems. All the graphic sexuality,
and writing about these things in a very matter of
fact way. Such as growing older. The lines in "The
Revered Poet Talks to Her Students" "Listen. I'm
trying to tell you / how easily the poem you
thought / was a beautiful woman becomes / cronelike
by a kind of witchery." There's that wonderful
parallel of being both inside and outside the poem
again.
KA: That was a persona poem in
that I didn't consider it to be about myself. I
created the persona of an older woman speaking to
young students. I could say that's not an
autobiographical poem, the poet in that poem is not
me. I'm not a "revered poet," for one
thing…
LL: Who's to say?
KA: I conceived of that as a
persona poem in the voice of an older woman. My
class had been reading Randall Jarrell's poem "Next
Day."But, of course, why did I choose that? It
still came from my imagination, so obviously on
some level I was concerned about that, about
aging.
LL: Well, I think the themes in your
work: loss of youth, loss of power, the "litany of
losses.…"
KA: And we are so bombarded in all
the media with images of youth. A lot of my
characters in In the Box Called Pleasure
really struggle with feeling bombarded by the
world, by images of who they are supposed to be,
and by violations of various kinds.
LL: What is the "box called
pleasure"?
KA: What is it? It's the same box
that holds pain. That's what's in the box called
pleasure. It's both things; it's the duality.
LL: Why is it in a box? Is it in a
box? And why is it "called" pleasure? Is it the box
of pleasure? Maybe I see things too metaphorically,
but there is this structure, and…
KA: It's trapped inside it.
LL: And then you also have this
consciousness of it being "called" something; you
have this languaging. You have this formal
structure, a container for all this pain, pleasure,
and then you have the languaging of it. Like the
glass and the way you write about the bottle, that
idea of being filled, the woman like the vessel.
But you write mostly about men sexually. Then you
have the great line from "In the Box Called
Pleasure" about women.
KA: It's basically…"It's the
love of women that has saved me."
LL: And yet, your writing is mostly
about men. Why is that?
KA: More of the loss and conflict
is around men. I haven't written about the
nourishing relationships I have with my women
friends because a lot of times, what triggers the
poem is conflict. The poem or story is an attempt
to work out that conflict, to symbolize it in some
way.
LL: Do you have any writing rituals? A
schedule, anything you do?
KA: For me, I find that if I don't
write first thing I won't get to it. So I try to
write first thing, at least three mornings a week.
If I don't do it then, the day interferes. So I
have some coffee, sit in bed, and write. I just get
up and grab a notebook and pen---the same kind I've
used for years---and read. I'll often start by
reading.
LL: What are you reading now?
KA: Well, I have about fifty books
beside my bed, and I tend to just pick them up and
put them down and read from different ones, looking
for something interesting. That's usually how I
read.
LL: Do you show your work in progress
to other people?
KA: I don't right now. I wish I
did. Mostly I sit on it, and I wait. And then I go
back to it. If it seems like it's working, I'll
send it out. It's hard to know sometimes. But I
trust myself more now to know when it's working and
when it isn't. Then if I am really unsure I will
e-mail the poem to Dorianne Laux, or ask a friend,
"What do you think?"
LL: What is the thing that sustains
you and your writing?
KA: Just the act of writing
itself. It's very freeing. It makes me very happy
to be writing. It's just something that I need to
do. And I definitely get out of balance when I'm
not doing it. Other people's writing too. Reading,
and just being sustained by that. Wanting to create
my own version. I'd be doing this, even if I hadn't
published. Hopefully getting better, but I'd still
be doing it. Obviously, I'd have a different kind
of life, probably some other job.
LL: If you had that other life, what
would you be? I feel like James Lipton on, what's
the name of that show on BRAVO?
KA: "Inside the Actor's
Studio."Well, I wanted to be a musician. So maybe I
would have stayed with the music. But I still play.
I'm learning blues harmonica now. I really love the
blues.
LL: Your poems are like blues. So you
haven't gone too far from that.
KA: Yeah. And I originally wanted
to be a singer. But I think I've ended up being a
singer in another way.
Widely published writer, translator, and poet
Leza Lowitz is the author of Yoga Poems, Old
Ways to Fold New Paper and co-editor, with
Miyuki Aoyama, of several anthologies of Japanese
women's poetry, A Long Rainy Season: Haiku
& Tanka (also co-edited by Akemi Tomioka)
and Other Side River: Free Verse.
Silence to Light: Japan and the Shadows of
War, co-edited with Frank Stewart, was published
last summer by the University of Hawaii Press. She
lives in Petaluma, California.
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