Interviewed by Rachel Inez Lane
Jennifer Militello is the author several chapbooks, including Anchor Chain, Open Sail. Her poems have been widely published in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and anthologized in Best New Poets 2008. Her work has been awarded grants and fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Writers at Work, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She has taught at Brown University, The Rhode Island School of Design, and The University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and is currently a professor at River Valley Community College in Claremont, New Hampshire. Her new collection of poetry, Flinch of Song, is the winner of the Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse First Book Prize.
Q: A few months ago, Poets & Writers gave a list of new and upcoming poets to lookout for. One of the questions asked was about how long it took them to write their debut book. I was surprised to see the average time was seven years. When thinking more in depth this made sense. Many poetry books tend to suffer from not having a kind of connective tissue. Your debut book Flinch of Song has a definite narrative and struck me as being very diligently put together. How has this processes been for you?
A: Seven years sounds about right. Flinch of Song went through several versions over about six or seven years, and at one point absorbed poems I thought I was writing for a second manuscript. “Passing for Red,” the earliest poem in the book, was written as far back as 1998, during a period when I was simply working to make the best individual poems possible and had no idea how they might come together or how a collection might occur as a result. The more recent poems were written in about 2005. I revised right up until the book was taken. The book also started being a finalist for contests quite a few years before it won Tupelo’s First Book Prize. I kept writing and reorganizing and improving and figuring out what the book seemed to want to do so that by the time it was taken, it felt pretty right to me, free of earlier weaknesses and fluctuations and absolutely cohesive, full of “connective tissue” as you say. It’s nice to hear that this was your impression as well.
Q: You separate your book into chapters: “Museum of Being Born,” “Dark, Godless Reactions,” “Identity Narrative,” and “The Last Burning Room.” Did you always intend on breaking your book up into chapters or was this something that happened gradually?
A: The book evolved as I began to get better at understanding what a book as a whole should do. In the version that finally was taken, I basically, in exasperation, threw everything I had into a pile and re-sorted. In this way, the sections, or chapters as you call them, emerged. And the themes that rule those sections—family, love, identity, and the overall arc of the book from birth to death—came as a result of that final construction attempt. I also began to think of each section as a small book in and of itself. I worked to obtain that same arc of tension within these smaller arenas as I did over the course of the book as a whole. I looked to have a strong start and finish to each section. And then made sure that they could echo together, that the voice of the speaker and those few significant images and obsessive concerns knit the volume neatly into one unit of struggle and thought.
Q: While researching I found a short piece online that showed you in front of your stunning, and serene, backyard studio in New Hampshire. Talk about the perfect poet’s workshop. Every writer seems to have their own little ecosystem, which they create in—what’s yours?
A: As I think that article mentions, my studio was a huge gift—literally the gift of space outside the realm of everyday life. But for me, the physical space of a ‘workshop’ is really about the mental space one is attempting to achieve and enter into while there. That mental condition needed to get to that place where the writing is real and raw and true, when you let go of the reins and that powerful muscle of the mind just goes. It can take weeks to get into my head enough to do this kind of work. It requires sitting and thinking and reading and staring into space—letting the brain work secretly when it seems no work is being done.
As for physical conditions, I prefer to write late at night when I have the freedom. When I am writing the raw material, as I think of it, the stuff that will go into poems, I like to drink a beer or two, maybe smoke a cigarette or listen to music. I like to let myself off the hook as much as possible because otherwise the critical interference overwhelms my ability to work freely. And then when I am shaping drafts or revising, things get all A-type personality, all awake and tidy, with too much Earl Grey tea and fresh sheets of legal-sized paper. Then, it’s actually about the interference. I work to get alert, a state almost completely oppositional to the other, where the attention needed to make the best decisions is the key. I like a big desk to spread out on. I like a room that has many windows and is in the woods. I like crazy art around for its reconfiguration of things. Above my desk, I have this piece called “Reliquary for a Phoenix Flight” made by my friend Lauren Raine; I love it for its torn piece of a delicate nightgown filled with stones and its weird feather and its whitened bone.
Q: I am a big Lorca fan and (as nerdy as this may sound) got super excited when you began your book with a quote from a poem of his I have always found to be rather political, “Blind Panorama of New York.” I couldn’t help to notice an immediate similarity when reading your introductory poem, “Manifestation,” where you write, “The world is always speaking hems/ of dresses, evergreens, always speaking never/ The world is the jawbone of where we cannot go.” Would you say Lorca’s work has been one of your poetic companions?
A: Absolutely. And don’t feel nerdy; Lorca is super exciting. I found his work in graduate school, when I read Poet in New York, and I remember being just floored. Lorca has, at his best, what a friend of mine calls “unpredictable inevitability.” The images, the comparisons, are surprising, push at our logical, common sense understanding of existence—the way they say the best ideas in physics do—and yet they are exactly right. They open up a new seeing. They make the facets of the world shed a different light. Robert Bly also talks about this as “the leap.” And after reading Lorca, it became clear to me that the ambition of trying to express everything roiling around abstractly within, everything not normally shared, is so challenging that using ‘everyday’ language often cannot meet that challenge. To put two seemingly incongruent items or ideas or images together so that each could be re-seen, so that they would resonate together and make the world clearer and more dimensioned in a way that stays with the reader, impales the reader, changes him or her, in a way that it hasn’t been encountered before, that to me is one of the great aims of poetry.
Q: Your lyricism is dreamy, and nature plays many characters within The Finch of Song. The poem “Living Where the Halyard Can Be Hard” I feel best describes your speaker’s voice by saying, “The only identity I know is alone in the sighs/ bright wilderness.” Your poetry has an aura of solitude about it, and Kathy Fagan bestows quite the compliment about your work by saying that “Dickinson is [your] poetic ancestor.” What has been your relationship with Emily Dickinson’s work?
A: Without Dickinson, I don’t know that I’d be writing poetry. I stumbled across her poems when I was very young, and reading them changed my life. I was a child. I didn’t know that others were feeling or seeing or thinking what I was, and I certainly didn’t know that all that mixed up mess that defined me could be expressed. Those poems were electric. They were inside me already waiting to be recognized. They knocked me right down, and when I got up again, I said to myself, I want to do this. I want to recreate this interior labyrinth with an alive, vital order of images and sounds, with this kind of half object, half animal, the poem, that worms right into you like a parasite and feeds you and keeps you starving at once.
And yes, there is much solitude in the poems in Flinch of Song. I wrote most of them while living alone in a little apartment in Nashua, New Hampshire. I didn’t know anyone in the town; it was a kind of self-imposed exile. I used to just wander around among these old brick factories and churches on Main Street and look at people living their lives and observe and be quiet and then go back to my desk in this little back room. It forced me to work in a way that interruption doesn’t allow for, and it was wonderful. And so that leaked through to this speaker who I think of as an offspring of ghosts, a sibling to loss, victim of a variety of predators, someone very aware that the second part of that phrase you quote from “Living Where the Halyards Can Be Heard” is the fact that you can take apart the workings and still not understanding them; you can break that pocket watch of existing down into its particular and interesting pieces to see how they move and fit and gleam but still be left with the mystery of the whole.
Q: I feel some scholars tend to overlook how cutting Emily Dickinson’s poetry can be. I find that some critics tend to unfairly label a woman’s poetry as being “vulnerable” or “confessional.” As a women, what hardships do you feel the female poet faces?
A: This is a tough one, if only because the issue is so complex. I think the most difficult obstacle a woman poet (and any woman) faces is cultural. Our society continues to send the message to women that they must fit a particular stereotype: they are held to a nearly impossible standard of selflessness, they are required to put great energy into their physical appearance, they are rewarded for downplaying their intelligence, all while it is continuously suggested that if they do not partner and procreate, they are less than complete, that their value is tied in to this kind of behavior. And these are subtle messages of such complexity that it takes years to even begin to discover and define them. To actually fight them takes more gumption than most people can muster, and drains energy from other pursuits. So a woman starts off with these issues of identity to overcome, or at least make peace with since that may be the best that can be done, if she is to work and work seriously and in a way that consumes her.
And then of course there is the related issue that you mention: whether one is taken seriously as an artist and a writer and a thinker. It is easy to pigeonhole woman writers into the categories you mention, and then one doesn’t need to read beyond a certain point, one has placed the work in a box that defines and perhaps limits its value and that’s that. Dickinson of course is larger than the categories one could place her in, as is any great poet. And yet this sort of convenient and reductive label persists, this impression of women as emotional and ‘vulnerable’ and weaker as a result. Look at our contemporary American woman poets: they are strong and smart and ambitious. Their gender should not be a factor in weighing the value of what they do, and it certainly shouldn’t belittle what the work puts forth and achieves on its own.
