Author Asks
- Although Bad Judgment is a collection of individual poems, I think there is a narrative arc to the book. Do you? If so, how do you see the "plot"? Do you find divergences in the plot line? If so, what do you think they add or take away from the overall "story"?
- This collection includes fairly straightforward and realistic narrative poems as well as surreal ones, what I call "fractured fairy tales" (stealing the term from Rocky and Bullwinkle). What do you make of these more dreamlike pieces? Of the interaction (or lack thereof) between the different types of poems?
- Clearly, I have a penchant for catalogues. I enjoy the associative force of this sort of poem, but, of course, the trick is to come up with a way out of the list (and to make the list somehow engaging). What do you feel is the effect of cataloguing in the list poems?
- Babies seem to me to figure prominently in the book, in various ways and forms. What do you make of the depictions of babies?
- I believe there is a fair amount of social satire in Bad Judgment. At least, I tried to target some of my pet peeves, particularly easy or conventional answers to what seem to me difficult and complex questions. How do you read the targets and the critiques?
- I think of Bad Judgment as a woman’s book. That is, not only am I a woman writer but the collection also seems to me to address a number of questions and/or concerns about roles that women may play in our culture: from single "wild card" to bride. What roles do you find in the book? What are your responses to them?
- The language attached to various roles or poses intrigues me. The elaborate descriptions of attire in "My Summer as a Bride" derive, in part, from bridal magazines, and some of the formulations in "Beyond the Power of Positive Thinking" are similar to those found within a New Age self-empowerment text. Perhaps the uses of language, especially the seemingly moribund vocabulary of clichés, would be an avenue to explore.
- Although I certainly regard myself as a feminist, I can see someone arguing that the book, despite its caveats and quibbles, upholds the status quo since marriage is depicted as a desirable attainment. Perhaps a general discussion of feminist poetry would be stimulating, especially regarding what expectations we have of poetry that is defined as such.
- As a student, I was told that poems should not be about poetry, yet surely many wonderful poems could fall into the category of ars poetica (I also have been told that every poem is in some way about poetry). At any rate, several of the pieces in Bad Judgment comment on aspects of the current scene in poetry.
| a) | "The Last Angel Poem" came out of my frustration with not getting my first book, which had a catchy angel title, into print before a slew of other angel-titled books of poetry came out. Slowly, I began unstitching angels from that collection (and I changed the title to Lessons in Space), but I remain fascinated by the zeitgeist that produced both my own angels and those of my fellow poets. What is it with angels? What do they mean to us? Why have so many poets recently exploited (used or transformed) the figure of the angel? | | b) | "Self" also is part of a debate in contemporary American poetry. The poem sprang from discussions over the dinner table at an artist colony, with poets squaring off and defending their own camps. A more immediate catalyst was the suggestion by a young male poet that I "take the self" out of my poems. Obviously, the notion of a coherent self, that Romantic staple, is now "a contested site." I wonder what readers think about the debate in general and about the issues that my poem tries to address. Can you write about an essential "self" anymore? Do you find the absence of "self" terrifying? Liberating? Perhaps my poem "Lunatic Snow" provides a counterpoint to the argument presented in "Self."
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| 10. | In some ways my sensibility seems to me more modern than postmodern, despite an affection for popular culture and what I am told is an ironic sense of humor: I tend to long for meaning in what seems to be a meaningless world rather than to celebrate freedom from meaning. Perhaps readers might engage in the question of meaning within the book. What does it mean to the speakers in these poems to lose meaning? Do you think there is a solution posed to the problem of meaninglessness?
| | 11. | I also have thought of Bad Judgment as my "death and sex" book. What do you make of the assortment of dead (and undead) figures here? It might be fruitful to compare "Dear Lynda," my elegy for the poet Lynda Schraufnagel, with other elegies, especially those mourning the loss of fellow poets (Kumin’s "How It Is" for Sexton and Sexton’s "Sylvia’s Death" for Plath come to mind). (As a side note, I wish that I had written W.S. Merwin’s one-line "Elegy": "Who would I show it to?")
| | 12. | For the sex half of the "death and sex" equation, Bad Judgment includes several love poems, which I believe are almost as difficult to write as elegies.
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| a) | I would be interested to know how readers respond to these poems, especially since a female poet wrote them to a (younger) man. Helplessly, as I approached writing them, I thought of Shakespeare’s sonnets to the "Fair Youth" and of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. | | b) | In "Trinity," I inserted a little of Andrew Marvell’s poem "To His Coy Mistress." His opening couplet goes: "Had we but world enough, and time / This coyness, lady, were no crime." My appropriation runs: "Yes, my dears, had we but world enough, / and time and again I leave as I came, sexy to men/because I’m not sleeping with any of them . . . ." I love Marvell’s poem, which seems to me the quintessential carpe diem. Its rhetoric is deftly done, with the neat "If, But, Therefore" structure of the speaker’s rather terrifying explanation of why the coy mistress should seek her pleasures now. Perhaps it would be interesting to compare the two poems. |
Other possible comparisons: Sexton’s "Hansel and Gretel" and "Floating"
Dugan’s "Love Song: I and Thou" and "My Summer as a Bride"
Yeats’ "Adam’s Curse" and "Floating"
Larkin’s "Talking in Bed" and "When Forever Began"
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