Interview

In both structure and content, your poems suggest a radical geometry of thought spiked at every possibility with tangents. How do you manage to create shapely poems that celebrate—but don’t dissolve in—chaos?

"It’s so nice to think that the poems have ‘a radical geometry of thought’ though I am not sure that they do, and I’m not at all certain that they celebrate chaos. I myself don’t celebrate chaos. One residual effect of my Catholic upbringing has been a preference for a world neatly divided into black and white, right and wrong, but that world seems to me to have ended; at least, it largely has ended for me, and, although I like to think that I am guided by my own moral compass, I have found it increasingly difficult to make categorical assessments of others, even of myself. The tension that you have sensed in the poems may come from this fissure within me: I want order, but order eludes me. Besides, although I am devoted to narrative, I also am attracted to poems that move by association. I may have been moved at a too tender age by two of Frost’s most famous maxims: ‘Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting. . . .’ and ‘No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. . . .’ Genuine surprise is a great pleasure for me, that moment of taking in something new, something wholly unexpected. Perhaps it is that moment that to my mind is the most transgressive: a world of black and white does not allow for much surprise."

Your poems are decidedly feminist yet so-called "traditional" women’s roles—especially that of wife—are appealingly portrayed. What makes it possible, in your poems, to escape the "camps" of other versions of feminism?

"Wow, I dream about having to justify my life. It’s an interesting sensation being asked to do so in print. Yes, I am a feminist. I will be one until women have achieved legal, political, social, sexual, and economic equality with men. Then I will be happy to embrace a ‘post-feminist’ phase of history. Maybe this will occur sometime around the next Millennium (I’m talking 3001). Thus, I probably will end up like an old socialist grandfather rocking away angrily in his chair. However, as much as I admire radical feminists and lesbian separatists, I am heterosexual, and, as one friend put it, I always have been a femme. I am not ideologically pure. If I were, I don’t think I would have married. I especially feel ambivalent about the rights that the state accords to me because of my married status when same-sex partners are not allowed those privileges. But I am attracted to ritual, to vows, undoubtedly also due to Catholicism (it’s great being able to blame so much on the Church). I wanted both of us legally bound as well, both for straightforward economic reasons and for less straightforward emotional ones (he is mine). I believe that the marriage has been a mix of orthodoxy and attempts at undermining that. It is contradictory. Undoubtedly, the poems which trace the trajectory of our romance into matrimony are as well. Perhaps they are about an attempt to live within these contradictions. What can I say? Reader, I married him. I found a great wedding dress too.