Maryann Corbett : part five

What are you working on?

I hope I’m allowed to interpret “working on” broadly. 

With the publisher now, and due out late this year or early next, is my sixth book, called The O in the Air. It’s largely about growing up Catholic in a family with too many secrets, but it also includes other family-centered poems.

Because I’ve always found it difficult to find places in collections for my lighter poems, quite a few of them remain uncollected. But I like them, so I’m now pulling together from the uncollected pile a book of light-hearted poems, tentatively called Airheads.

When I’ve done all this collecting, the poems left in the pile will—I hope—tell me what I should be writing about, so that the next book has a shape. But I say “I hope” because I’ve never yet been able to write “a book.” I write individual poems and then hope I can make them speak to each other. This often works because I have, shall we say, some recurring obsessions.

Longer term, and even more tentatively, I hope to do more translations of the poetry of Christine de Pizan for a possible collection. She lived in the late 14th and early 15th centuries and wrote in Middle French. She’s best known for her feminist prose. Her poetry deserves more attention, and it should be translated in rhyme and meter, as she wrote it.

Maryann Corbett : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

The waiting. Waiting for another poem trigger to spring, waiting for the wraith of a poem to take enough shape to be ready to write something down. I didn’t have to deal with waiting when I first came back to poetry; I had a decades-long backlog of material to draw on, and the poems came quickly. They take longer now. The combination of retirement and the pandemic has forced a kind of quiet in which fewer things happen that grab the mind in a way that triggers poems. 

When the period of waiting gets long enough to rattle me, I translate. Or I try to read deeply in some subject area, generally history. I distrust canned poetry prompts and ekphrastic verse—don’t ask me why, but to me they feel too artificial. Reviewing the work of other poets and writing critical essays are other ways of making the waiting fruitful.

Maryann Corbett : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

It’s central, in the sense that I generally use meter even when I don’t use rhyme. The one problem with concentrating on very old poetry and linguistics is that it doesn’t leave many credit hours for contemporary poetry! So my ears were almost entirely trained by poems in meter, and I did little real study of free verse. That accounts for my habit of setting out in some sort of meter whenever I start to write a poem—turning the meter on like a spigot and letting it run. I’m as likely to begin with a rhythm as with an image or phrase. I’ve said this before: I think of rhyme as a ladder down into the dark of the subconscious and of meter as the underground spring I find there.

I’m also likely to decide at the outset that a poem is going to be in a particular form. When I admit this, other poets tell me I’m out of my mind—that the words must come first and then be helped to find form--but somehow my backwards method usually works. When it doesn’t, it takes me a long time to back out, shake off the initial sound pattern, and begin with a new one.

Music has also provided an important trigger for poems, as I’ve been a singer in various kinds of choirs for most of my life, and a cantor in various local churches. The title of my first book, Breath Control, is an allusion to singing and to the kind of held-in containment that life often requires. My third book, Mid Evil, includes a section of church-music poems. Psalm and hymn texts probably have something to do with my love of meter, too.

Maryann Corbett : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I’m going to interpret “changed” to include “allowed to begin again.” After busy decades of full-time work and parenting, I went through some life changes and emotional upheavals when I hit the empty-nest phase, and I began putting those upheavals on paper. At the same moment, I met a real poet, Anna George Meek, and had many opportunities to talk with her about poetry. And I discovered online poetry communities and online journals, and those supplied the support and the awareness of an audience that fired me to write again. I also began, barely, to catch up with the years of contemporary poetry I’d been missing.

I worked with as many as seven online poetry forums in those early years, and I owe them all; I’ll mention in particular The Gazebo and The Waters. But my greatest debt is to Eratosphere, and especially to the formal poets who frequented that forum from about 2006 to 2011. Their discussions of midcentury poets like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and W.D. Snodgrass persuaded me that I wasn’t crazy to prefer rhyme and meter. I’ll always be grateful to the late Timothy Murphy for his early encouragement.

I’m still in touch with most of my poetry-board contacts in various social-media ways. Poets I met on those boards and am still reading include A.E. Stallings, Aaron Poochigian, Rhina P. Espaillat, Susan McLean, Catherine Tufariello, A.M. Juster, R.S. Gwynn, and Wendy Videlock. And maybe I should stop there, apologizing that in my forgetfulness I’m leaving out dozens of people . . .

Maryann Corbett : part one

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry in 2005, after thirty years away from the craft, and is now the author of two chapbooks, five full-length books of poetry, and a forthcoming book. Her work has won or has been shortlisted for the Able Muse Book Prize, the Hollis Summers Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, the Morton Marr Prize, the Richard Wilbur Award, and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and has appeared in journals on both sides of the Atlantic as well as an assortment of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2018. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Writer's Almanac, and on the Poetry Foundation website.

Photo credit: Mims Photography, St. Paul, MN

How did you first engage with poetry?

I’m not sure how early “first” is, or what exactly “engage” means, so I’m going to interpret those words broadly. I grew up in an era in which poems still appeared in magazines, and I recall that I aped one such poem—rhymed and in tetrameter—somewhere in the early grades and was praised to the skies. My eighth-grade teacher—I think she must have been working on a master’s at the time—exposed us to scansion, the names of the feet and meters, and a lot of Frost and Hopkins, among many other anthology standards.  High school AP English courses probably sealed my decision to study English later on.

I’m not sure why my teenage poems were in free verse, but I hope they’ve all been destroyed. (To be clear, I like to read free verse, but writing it doesn’t come naturally to me.)

Apart from one college-era poem (in iambic pentameter) I then left the writing of poetry alone for decades, earning the usual BA, MA, and PhD, specializing in medieval literature and linguistics, and aiming to be a scholar rather than a writer. 

But a scholarly career was not in the cards, and for about thirty-five years I worked for the the Revisor’s Office, helping to draft bills and create and edit indexes. Because that office was very strictly nonpartisan, I had to avoid saying anything in public that could be interpreted as favoring a political stance. I stayed quiet for a long time.

I think I’ll leave the story of ceasing to be quiet for one of your other questions.