Interview

There is a certain slipperiness to your poems, an alluring danger and heat that makes this collection almost flirtatious—intriguing yet shy, revealing and yet kept at a cool distance. Do you agree? What do you think might lend itself to such a balanced arsenal of contradictions?

Wallace Stevens states in his essay "The Irrational Element in Poetry" that "while there is nothing automatic about a poem, nevertheless it has an automatic aspect in the sense that it is what I wanted it to be without knowing before it was written what I wanted it to be, even though I knew before it was written what I wanted to do." I am hiding behind this quote because it expresses my reluctance at commenting on the effect of my poems in such a way that can only be done in retrospect of writing them. If the arsenal is balanced . . . that may be because many of the poems in this collection are hinged on a love that has, by necessity, become something other than affection. Perhaps the speaker of my poems wishes to paradoxically extinguish and rescue the lover. I find that the most satisfying poets attempt to blur the lines between the good and bad, between what is hideous and outrageously lovely. The poetry I love reveals us at our most sadly dangerous. There is an outrage that fuels my poems. It is an anger exercised against the dishonesty one finds so calmly practiced in daily life. . . . I hope for the reader to feel the speaker's breath on his or her ear—that is, very close, and not at all distanced.

How did you arrive at your interest in form?

I assume the "form" you speak of is traditional form. I don't consider myself a poet who works in traditional form because I rarely do. I do, however, have formal inclinations as a poet. I have a strong predilection for internal rhyme, and I prefer a neatly crafted, shapely stanza. This may be what Dana Gioia has termed (disparagingly) "pseudo-form." I once heard Mark Strand refer to stanzas without consistent rhyme and meter as "a visual contract with the reader." My use of couplets, tercets, quatrains, etc., in the poems is an attempt to organize the essentially chaotic content of the poems. I like it when a poem appears nicely crafted and orderly, despite the fact that its contents are emotional and unruly. Perhaps in this manner the formal appearance of my poems operates as a sort of disguise. . . .

Issues of control are central to many of my poems. That's where the elements come in. Not just fire, but oceans, storms, tornadoes, etc. It's funny, because I'm always bored to tears when people talk about the weather. I always think, Why talk about it when there's nothing you can do about it? But the truth is people like to discuss weather because it's out of their control. And it's a safe thing to chat about with a stranger. On the other hand, the speaker in several of my poems wishes to control the elements. This is my idea of the pathetic fallacy taken to an extreme. There's something both comic and despairing about an individual who insists that the stars come out on her behalf. . . .