H.E. Fisher : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I live in the Hudson River Valley in New York. We have a wonderful library system here. I’m always checking books out. I love reading multiple books at once. I try to mix it up so that I’m reading new work while familiarizing myself with older texts. There’s a growing stack on my floor, which right now includes The Beauty, by Jane Hirshfield; Trilce by César Vallejo; What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems by Ruth Stone; What Happens is Neither by Angela Narciso Torres; and How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy by Joan Kwon Glass. Among many others. There are some poets I circle back to often: John Murillo, Diane Seuss, and Cynthia Cruz, to name a few.

One of the beautiful things about following poets on different social media platforms is that they often post poems. Ilya Kaminsky and Chen Chen, for example, often post amazing poems, which then leads me to discovering someone new to read. Or poets will share their own work and that’s another resource. 

H.E. Fisher : part four

How does a poem begin?

A single image, a word I like, a line that comes to me, a particular experience, something I read in the news, a memory—there are many ways a poem finds me. Then a kind of obsession takes over and I am drawn to it, to working it, revising it. I also love research. It can be anything from researching wildflowers to the Industrial Revolution to a kind of bird. Some poems begin with research if I have an idea about something; or something I write might lead to research. 

H.E. Fisher : part three

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

As a reader of poetry, I appreciate the way a poem can pull the curtain back on anything that exists in our internal and external worlds and reveal something that the poem has made space for. Poems magnify. They are concentrated. Poems are places for me to transfer very specific thoughts, ideas, impressions. A poem doesn’t flinch; it lives under its own pressure. There’s something delicious and dangerous about that. 

H.E. Fisher : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I love this question. It is an entirely mysterious thing to me. I’ll get a feeling, a sense of wholeness, when a poem is finished. Which sounds far too highfalutin. It just means that a poem feels done. Conversely, when a poem isn’t finished, it bothers me; it feels off and can keep me up at night. Is the form right and does it serve the poem? Is each word the right word? Is the lineation correct? Etc. I spend a lot of time reading each draft of a poem out loud to see if it sounds right to me. On the other hand, maybe poems are never done.

H.E. Fisher : part one

H.E. Fisher’s poetry, prose poems, and essays appear or are forthcoming in Whale Road Review, Novus, The Rumpus, Pithead Chapel, Longleaf Review, Miracle Monocle, Anti-Heroin Chic, Indianapolis Review, and Canary, among other publications. She has twice been nominated for Best of the Net. H.E. is the editor of (Re) An Ideas Journal. Her first collection, STERILE FIELD, a hybrid, (Free Lines Press) and poetry chapbook, JANE ALMOST ALWAYS SMILES (Moonstone Press), are forthcoming in 2022. 

How did you first engage with poetry?

I grew up in a house with lots of books. I remember poems being read to me as a small child. One of my brothers, who is ten years older than me, wrote poetry. It seemed like poetry was always around. I wrote poems in high school and then at Purchase College as an undergrad, which is when I first read Emily Dickenson, the Romantics, Shakespeare’s sonnets. The summer before my senior year in college, I found a book on my family’s bookshelf called The Zig Zag Walk by a beat poet named John Logan. One of the poems in the book is called “Lines for Michael in the Picture”. This was really the first time I read a (fairly) contemporary poem. And it blew my mind. It’s a long poem, but the language was accessible and relatable. I loved the music of the poem. Whatever that thing is that poetry does, really got its claws into me. Though it wasn’t until I began pursuing my MFA at City College of New York and took a class on prosody with the program’s director and poet, Michelle Valladares, that I began concentrating more on writing poetry. There’s a 35 year gap between reading John Logan and being in Michelle’s class.