Interviewed by Emily Westbrook
Rebecca Wolff grew up in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. At 15, she published her first poem in Seventeen Magazine. Wolff received her bachelor’s degree at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1991. Her final year of undergraduate study was spent in Glasgow, Scotland and she hitchhiked around Europe, protesting the Gulf War as a member of the Socialist Party. She also advocated re-foresting the moorlands as a member of the “Green Group.” In 1993, Wolff received her Master of Fine Arts in poetry. Later, she organized a literary journal, Fence, along with several other coeditors. In 2001 her first book of poems, Manderley, was published, and in 2002, she married the novelist Ira Sher. Wolff’s second book of poems, Figment, won the Barnard Women Poets Prize. In 2007, Fence and Fence Books found sponsorship at the University at Albany, in partnership with the New York State Writers Institute, of which Wolff is now a Program Fellow. The King is her third book of poetry.
Q: What was your inspiration to write the poem “Eminent Victorians” in your book Figment?
A: I was daydreaming about having a child, and somehow that became merged in my mind with death, or mortality at least, in the form of this small antique graveyard, a Jewish-Portuguese one, that is still there on the block I grew up on, which is West 21st Street, in Manhattan.
The graveyard is very old and quite neglected but the city can’t take it out because it is a graveyard. I forget whether I was actually pregnant when I wrote the poem—I don’t think so. But soon after, I was. I guess I allowed all these factors of imagination to coalesce in my mind, and then I stole the title from a book by Lytton Strachey that is actually a biography of some eminent Victorians.Q: In your poem “Mamma didn’t raise no fools” you put a turn in the poem near the end with the line “I can’t remember how I died.” How did you come to put the turn in the poem?
A: Well, this too looks to be a poem that has quite an investment in death, or mortality, and attendant creepiness. I believe that that line, “I can’t remember how I died,” is one that I had written down as a scrap or fragment with the intention of using it at some point, and that point in the poem just seemed to be the right point at the right time. Many of the poems in Figment are “collaged,” or put together after-the-fact from existing parts; this is one. So I didn’t necessarily see it as a “turn” but I see now that you are right: It is one. I guess it turns into a poem about “me” instead of “him,” and about “making an entry in my diary” (the ultimate act of self-interest) rather than “honoring him.”
Q: I have heard rumor of you coming out with another book, titled The King, in 2009. Is this true? If so, are you excited about it?
A: Yes, it’s true! I’m very excited about it, as it’s been a long time coming. A lot of the work—though not all—is coming out of the experience of becoming a mother (pregnancy, birth, postpartum depression, recovering from that depression), which for me happened back in 2002, so it’s work that I am eager to see out in the world so that I can, um, move on from it I guess would be the way to describe it. I do like the book a lot; I don’t just see it as an obstacle; it’s work that I am proud of.
Q: The following can be answered in a word, a phrase, a sentence… Name a writer who is currently making you jealous.
Q: What kind of child were you?
A: I was pretty rebellious, actually.
Q: What is your relationship with rejection like?
A: I think I have about as hard a time with it as most people, most writers. I try to avoid it. I don’t actually send work out very often at all; I’m inclined to take any rejection as stark evidence of my total inadequacy.
Q: What book did you suffer for the most, and why?
A: The book I’m currently trying to finish, which is a novel, called The Beginners (forthcoming from Riverhead Books in 2011), and which I’ve been writing since 1994, literally. The current draft is the most intense revision I’ve ever done.
Q: What was the greatest surprise for you in your most recent writing?
A: That I don’t mind making sense. Not anymore, anyway.
Q: What writerly habit would you most like to break?
A: Not writing.
Q: Lastly… (one random fact to top it off) what did you have for lunch today?
A: Crabmeat dumplings and polenta with wild mushrooms. Swank!
