Julia Bloch : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

Very—and the poetry is important to the music. I come from a family of musicians—pianists, violinists, harpsichordists—so I’m lucky to feel at home in art and art making and especially music. I grew up surrounded by instruments and sheet music and going to performances, chamber music parties, rehearsals. I still practice when I can find the time on the upright piano I found on Craigslist, and I’ve collaborated with my father on a couple of libretti. When a composer with the Network for New Music in Philadelphia wrote a new piece for one of my poems, I was stunned by how much the structures of the music spoke to the structures of the language and how much the song could help the poem say in phrasing, modulation, tempo, all completely reimagined off the page.

Julia Bloch : part four

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

Bernadette Mayer’s “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica” is a pretty big touchstone for me. I love the looseness of the lines, the way the lines break kind of haltingly, raggedly. I love the research-informed creative practice—Bernadette is thinking about what the Antarctic explorers went through and, in a way, questioning their story—and the links between past and present. I love how each line, each sentence unit, is like a little essay in itself, turning inside an argument, all accumulating like snow.

Julia Bloch : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry requires only a writing surface & tool (or device); it’s a very accessible art form. But it can also draw us so close to the structures of language and teach us how to be mindful, critical, suspicious of them. It helps us think about scale and stillness and movement. Other art forms can do these things too, in different ways, sure—but I’m pretty partial to the space of poetry, what others have called the field, the compositional field, the sense of possibility, even if you’re writing a poem about how inescapable something like the Western medical complex can feel.

Julia Bloch : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I’m not sure a poem is ever finished, in terms of the writing/revision process; I think it’s more like hitting a pause button. I push a poem as far as it will go, or maybe as far as it will let me go, and at a certain point either have to halt changes or move on to the next piece. Some poems might be finished but behave more like archives for other poems; they don’t all necessarily wind up getting published. One of the reasons I love writing about long poems, as a scholar, is that they help us think about the ways in which poems refuse being finished—they might interlock with others, or double back on themselves, or pause and begin again, or play with fragment and interruption.

Julia Bloch : part one

Julia Bloch grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia. She earned a BA in political philosophy from Carleton College, an MFA in creative writing from Mills College, and a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Letters to Kelly Clarkson, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and Valley Fever. She is the recipient of the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award from the San Francisco Foundation, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and other honors. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania and is an editor at Jacket2. She lives in Philadelphia.

Photo credit: Ryan Collerd.

What are you working on?

I am finalizing the pages of my third book, The Sacramento of Desire, which is being published in 2020. The book is about fertility, desire, and the queer experience of assisted reproduction; Allison Cobb calls it an “horological epic quest poem” and Sawako Nakayasu calls it “an urgent call.” I am also writing a new book, which will be a hybrid critical-creative work that includes poetry, essay, and memoir. It also deals with the political and social textures of assisted reproduction and queer kinship, but includes deep dives into queer theory and climate change grief.