Jackie Braje of The Poetry Society of New York briefly chatted with Kim Addonizio before our Poet Parlor event about craft, advice for aspiring writers, and bodies on the earthly plane of existence.
What subjects, ideas or themes have you been most drawn to while writing these days?
They’ve been pretty much the same my entire writing life. Love and death, suffering and our relationship to it. Life in a body on the earthly plane of existence. Something like that.
What does your relationship to your writing process look like? Do you have a specific and consistent practice?
I’m not very consistent these days. I’ve been trying to get back to a schedule. When I don’t read, I can’t write, and right now I’m having trouble concentrating in the middle of a pandemic and the end of the democratic American experiment.
Which writers or books have been the most sacred to you lately?
Right now, I’m listening more than reading. I’ve been falling asleep every night to Hilary Mantel’s last of the Cromwell trilogy. Love them all. I’ve been memorizing poems, something I hadn’t done for a while. Lately Yeats, Montale, and Millay. I’ve also got a chunk of the first section of Howl by heart. Memorizing does good things to your brain waves.
Who were your poetry mentors and how did they influence you?
I’ve never met my most important mentors. They’re mostly dead poets. I mean most of them are dead poets, not poets who are “mostly dead.”
What's one thing you'd like to try in a poem or a sequence of poems that you haven't tried before?
In my next book, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, coming out 2021, I have a poem that runs a dozen or so pages, with only one to four lines on a page. That felt like a real risk, but it just made sense. Someday I’d love to do a book of 14-liners. Sonnety things, but not necessarily strict sonnets. I’m very drawn to poems of that size.
Do you feel that there are certain parts of your identity that figure most strongly in your poetry?
The new book is very much a woman’s book. Both a performance, and maybe a critique, of female vulnerability. Along with the quotidian fucked-upness of the world.
What is your advice for aspiring writers?
Learn your craft, and care more about writing well than where you get published