Deborah Rosch Eifert : coda

What are you working on? 

Bodies - My husband has epilepsy, lung issues and Parkinson’s, and I have considered creating a microchap with poems I have written about our journey with that. I have two more manageable chronic issues (migraine, in particular, affects my quality of life); I also have had my body encounter a lot of coerced invasions – rape, sexual abuse, and a very minor cancer brush.  I am thinking of doing a chap or collection about being embodied, about bodies, caring for them, healing them, accepting them, struggling with them. I just had a piece in Feral, Issue 9 called “History of My Relationship with My Reproductive Tract.”

Deborah Rosch Eifert : part five

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “Song,” one of the most amazing poems of the 20th century. Rainer Maria Rilke, everything, ever. Jane Kenyon, “Let Evening Come” - so spare, but so powerful. Kenneth Koch, “Fresh Air,’” for when I am frustrated with Big Poetry Industry. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty” and its contemporary mirror, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” – another of the 20th century’s best poems, in my opinion.

Deborah Rosch Eifert : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing? 

So many! Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara – they opened me to the notion that you can have fun and be silly but also profound. Amy Gerstler, Carolyn Keyser, and Sally Rosen Kindred all opened me to fabulist imagery found in mythic yet also deeply personal poems. Amy Gerstler – when I first read Crown of Weeds, which I bought at a second-hand shop, I thought: she writes the way I write, and she is a legit professor and big prize winner, so maybe I am not a total weirdo! 

Deborah Rosch Eifert : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I get a lot of tips and emotional validation of experience at a Facebook group I belong to, Binders Full of Women Writers. Jodi Paloni runs some workshops, and is a Maine writer who has been encouraging to me. I have gotten a lot of encouragement from a community of writers and artists, Local Writers Read, that often use Quiet City Books (owner, Courtney Schlacter) in Lewiston Maine as an event space. I have a dear friend and coworker, Jason Grundstrom-Whitney, who is the author of Bear, Coyote, Raven published by Resolute Bear Press: we call ourselves a writers’ group of two. We are poet-brother and poet-sister and we often run things past each other.  At a recent reading we gave we talked about having that kind of relationship with another poet, how we found it, what it means and does for us.  You can see a video of the reading and that discussion, here.

Deborah Rosch Eifert : part two

How does a poem begin?

Sometimes with a random phrase that pops into my mind where there is a melody to the sound, almost song-like. Sometimes there is an image, either imaginary or something I see in the woods or at the shore, and I find I must describe it. Often some science article or video I have run across, like one about trees having heartbeats, may trigger a poem. If I am running dry, I try exercises – create as many non-cliché ways to describe a color as possible; describe an act or feeling but not by saying it in any direct manner, attempt something in form. I will write lists of other people’s lines I love, or just words that have an appealing or interesting sound and something may grow from that. Jericho Brown did an exercise in a workshop of taking a short poem and copying it down but using an opposite of every single word – that got me the line “Today’s glitter pours out tomorrow’s death.” Whoa! There is also an exercise of generating a word pool by going through an anthology or a long poetry collection, turning pages, writing down the last word on the page until you have 25 or so words, and then including them all in one poem. All those strategies or events are ways to lower my net into the river of unconscious words and images that flows bubbling along in my brain. Oh, and reading – reading is vital for priming the pump.

Deborah Rosch Eifert : part one

Deborah Rosch Eifert (@EifertPoetry) is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and the author of the newly released chapbook Sewn from Water, from Uncollected Press. Her work has appeared  in Whiskey Island Quarterly, Constellations, Cathexis Northwest, Persephone’s Daughters, as well as other literary presses, and is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic and Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art. Her work also has been published in several anthologies. She has received an Editor's Choice award from Formidable Woman Sanctuary Press, was named Poet of the Month by Flying Ketchup Press, was a semifinalist in the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition and was First Runner-up in the 2018 Esthetic Apostle Chapbook Contest.  

How did you first engage with poetry?

I started reading and writing poetry as a teenager. I had some very chaotic aspects to my home life including various kinds of violence I experienced throughout my early years. I was consumed by a constant tension between feeling compelled to communicate and being desperate to keep my reality secret. There was also a constant push-pull between the beauty I saw in nature and kind people against the ugliness and cruelty in humanity’s constructions and in people who bully, abuse, violate. Another dichotomy I lived out was that I was partly wild and reckless (I didn’t care what happened to me from anything I did) and partly an extremely timid ‘good girl.” I think poetry is dramatically well suited to showing and reconciling dichotomies, in indirect and startling ways. The first poets I really had much exposure to were confessional poets – Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin. I felt like it gave me permission to write, particularly Plath. Oddly, the things I loved by Plath 40 years ago I don’t care for as much now, and the things I disliked then, I really feel admiration for now – like “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” In college, I read “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Her Kind” compulsively. Then I mostly stopped writing for 35 years while I went to grad school in clinical psychology, went through a first marriage and raised my daughter. Moving back home to New England, frequently writing again, publishing my poems and hitting my mid-fifties all happened at about the same time.