Abigail Wender : part ten

How important is music to your poetry?

Music is an element of highest importance. I don’t think there is poetry without music. 

Abigail Wender : part nine

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

On my desk right now: Breathturn, Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris; Rehearsing the Symptoms, Ann Cotton, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop; The Voice, Robert Desnos, translated by William Kulik with Carole Frankel; and Pale Colors in a Tall Field, Carl Phillips. 

Abigail Wender : part eight

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

In random order: Ellen Bryant Voigt, Martha Rhodes, Emily Dickinson, Kimiko Hahn, Carl Phillips, Sappho, James Merrill, Eleanor Wilner, Geraldine Brooks, Paul Celan, Elizabeth Bishop, Catherine Barnett, Wislawa Szymborska, Cammy Thomas, Mary Jo Thompson, John Ashbery, Anna Akhmatova, Elizabeth T. Gray, Maeve Kinkead, Louise Glück, Sally Ball, Reginald Gibbons, Ingeborg Bachmann, Sarah Kirsch, Sharon Olds, Ann Cotten, and on and on and on. 

Abigail Wender : part seven

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Searching for an authentic subject. I don’t want to write about writing or about something that doesn’t mean a great deal to me. That’s why I like translation—it’s grounded in something vital. 

Abigail Wender : part six

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

I can’t speak for poetry in general--but for me, poetry is my medium. The song of poetry gets inside me and I like that, and I like words with all their nuances, different allusions, connotations, and references. Words are like tree roots, and there are so many roots to follow that it makes my heart beat faster and my brain snap louder.

Abigail Wender : part five

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 write notes in a book and sometimes share these beginning poems with other writers, sometimes not. Eventually I will share the poems I’m writing with a few close readers, to see if I’m on to something. I like to hear what my friends think. But my poems enter the world like infants--bare, raw, and generally unformed. Time will tell me what to do with them and I treat them gently. 

Abigail Wender : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Oh, yes! So much depends upon that word “consideration”…. For me, poetry is the interior language, mine and so many other writers’ as well. It’s the only way I can see the world as I did as a child, completely anew, “glazed with rain / water” and so on. Without metaphor and image, everything becomes flat and predictable.

Abigail Wender : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I don’t know. Is anything really “finished?” 

Abigail Wender : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I’ve been writing since early childhood. I loved to read and reading became writing. Writing was a way of seeing what I thought and could not say, learning what I felt and didn’t understand, what it was I’d witnessed but couldn’t make sense of. Eventually I began to think about compression and poetry, and then about how language was my artistic medium. 

Abigail Wender : part one

Abigail Wender’s poetry collection, Reliquary, was published in February 2021 (Four Way Books). Her translation from the German of The Bureau of Past Management, Iris Hanika’s award-winning novel, was published in October 2021 (V & Q Books). Poetry and translations were published or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Bodega, The Cortland Review, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, Epiphany, Kenyon Review Online, Massachusetts Review, New Orleans Review, No Man’s Land, SWIMM, Tupelo Quarterly, among others. She lives in New York City.

Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

What are you working on?

I’m working on a translation of a new German novel by Iris Hanika called Echo’s Chambers. Our first effort, The Bureau of Past Management, was published in the Germany and the UK in October 2021. Hanika is a poetic fiction writer, and there is a lot of poetry in her work. This book begins, for example, with a 1937 poem by Daniil Charms. It floored me—I’ll be looking for more of his work. The poem begins:

“Is there anything in the world that has meaning and might even change the course of events, not only on Earth but also in other worlds?” I asked my teacher.
“Yes,” answered my teacher.
“And what is it?” I asked.
“It is…” began my teacher and suddenly fell silent.