Joanna Fuhrman : part five

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

I am very lucky in that I live in NYC surrounded by other poets, and most of my friends are poets, so they get it. I also am privileged to be able teach poetry/creative writing as a career (which is another way it’s centered in my life), but sometimes writing in a genre that is so obscure does feel a little absurd. I think it’s hard for people who aren’t poets to understand how one could spend hundreds of hours on a single page of writing that no one is ever going to give you money for, and very few people are going to read.  Sometimes I can’t believe that I feel such a strong compulsion for poetry. I have some economic stability in my life now, but until very recently I was always struggling to figure out how to survive and still have time to write. I am not someone who can dash things off and have them be good (at least most of the time). For me, it usually takes a lot of work to write something I feel good about. 

Joanna Fuhrman : part four

How does a poem begin?

Some of my poems begin with images I get from dreams. I often wake up in the middle of the night and write some lines on my phone. When I wake up, I try to follow through on the dream logic and develop them more. Other poems start in classes I am teaching. I often ask my students to write in response to published poems. These in-class exercises involve various constraints. A lot of my work comes out of doing these exercises with my students or by trying out ideas/poetic strategies that I plan on teaching. Usually, I will get one or two lines from the exercise and then develop the fragments into finished poems later. 

Joanna Fuhrman : part three

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

I often return to the work of David Shapiro and Elaine Equi. David used to say about something he liked, “so fresh as if it were made tomorrow.” I feel that about their work. 

Joanna Fuhrman : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

In elementary school, I remember being obsessed with Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody, who are you?” And then in fifth grade, we had to memorize Blake’s “The Tyger,” which I loved. In both cases, poetry was something that I would say to myself as I walked around the playground. I also remember being in middle school and writing a poem in front of a pizza shop that would later burn down and feeling like I was struck by lightning. It was a terrible poem, but it got me to go to the library and look for poetry books to read. At the school library and at the library near my parents’ office, I found Rich’s book Leaflets and Orr’s Gathering the Bones together, both of which spoke to me.

Joanna Fuhrman : part one

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of six books of poetry, including To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press, 2021), The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press, 2015) and Pageant (Alice James Books, 2009). Her poetry videos have appeared in Triquarterly, Moving Poems Journal, Fence Digital, Posit and other online journals, as well as on her own Vimeo page. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches poetry and multimedia writing at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. For more see: Joannafuhrman.com

What are you working on?

I’m finishing a book of prose poetry called Data Mind about how it feels to live life online as a non-digital native. My generation entered the internet era with a lot of optimism about what online life might offer us, so it’s been painful to watch how social media has exacerbated the problems in our quasi-democracy/necrocapitalist economy. As someone who loves social media, I am trying to capture my own ambivalence. Some of the poems use the tropes of digital life to look back at pop culture from the past.  

I’m also working on a different book of poetry, mainly about my mom’s death, called The Last Phone Booth in the World. The prose poem manuscript is dense and surreal, while the newer manuscript feels more magical realist and dreamlike. I’m also hoping to get back into making poetry videos.