Jennifer Firestone : part five

Why is poetry important? 

I find this question, or versions of it interesting (e.g. “Can Poetry Matter”). Americans definitely circle back and around this idea and worry that poetry is perhaps not important. It seems partially to do with the fact that poetry is not linked to capital or is in a very tenuous way, and so can poetry have value if it doesn’t have “value.” Poetry has personally resuscitated me, led me to interesting, supportive communities, and taught me how to mediate and actively explore my curiosities and concerns. I don’t take its role lightly. As a professor of poetry for over two decades I see its transformative properties leaving tracks all over my students. Whether it’s by examining the tightly balanced syntactical units of a Gwendolyn Brooks poems, her documentary eye archiving the working class neighborhoods of Chicago, or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s look at migration, selfhood and speech in her hybrid and fused chorus of voices in Dictée, these poets grapple with language to express and archive important lived experiences and to question the world. I have seen students, many marginalized ones in particular, step into areas that felt inarticulable and taboo. It’s a wonder.

Poetry is one of the oldest art forms, what we turn to when we grieve, when we protest, and when we celebrate. Poetry in its boundlessness straddles various animal/alien worlds that only it can do.

Jennifer Firestone : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

A good poem is not necessarily a “popular” poem. I studied with Myung Mi Kim and she would try to encourage us to push aside our egos away from the poem that was trying to wrangle free. It’s very hard to do this. We are influenced by aesthetics, politics, trends, our daily moods. The poem is misbehaving, subversive. It doesn’t entirely care if I don’t get what it’s saying. I can’t necessarily rush it or perform it. It’s not all about me. It has to radiate outward, linguistically, thematically and formally.

Jennifer Firestone : part three

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’ve been fortunate to have been in many writing groups since graduate school with some really smart, thoughtful writers. Several of these groups have seen manuscripts of mine come to fruition. Poems from my most recent book Ten, published by BlazeVOX, began as a ten-line exercise to stave off boredom during the recovery of major knee surgery, and were dispersed among a group of writers (Amanda Field, Stefania Heim, Katy Lederer, Caitlin McDonnell, Lynn Melnick, Carley Moore, Idra Novey, Laura Sims and Leah Souffrant). We all had young children, who were with us flinging food and objects and making a ruckus. But when it came down to it the workshops were sharp and efficient.

This same group saw the beginning of a book-length poem, STORY, which is about to be published this December by Ugly Duckling Presse. While sharing some of STORY I got together with another writing group: Erica Hunt, Brenda Coultas, Karen Weiser and Marcella Durand. These poets read STORY in manuscript-form and offered great feedback. I actually remember coming in a few minutes late at the day I was going to workshop STORY and hearing some of the poets guess whether or not Story was an actual “story.” That was fun!

As of late I find it’s hard for me and other writers to schedule writing groups so I’ve been breaking off with various writers I respect and share work that way. I also love to writer via solicitation for a specific project or collaboration, which provide opportunities to derail my own obsessions for a bit.  Also, lately, I just write to my friends. My friend Laura Y. Liu and I wrote a collaborative poem, an ode, to our dear friend and colleague and renowned feminist, Ann Snitow, when she was retiring from Eugene Lang College. I wrote a poem to Marcella Durand after we dropped off our kids at summer camp and swam in a beautiful river.

Jennifer Firestone : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

If the process begins to feel vapid, empty, in a way that’s not interesting or with promise, then I move on. It’s fairly intuitive, though I read/revise my work endlessly. I try not to be precious about the “perfect” poem. I don’t think poems are necessarily ever finished in their perpetually-thinking bodies. And maybe I at times just run out of steam or need to switch gears, though I would argue that it is also sometimes the reason to stay.

Jennifer Firestone : part one

Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry and four chapbooks including Story (UDP), Ten, (BlazeVOX [books]), Gates & Fields (Belladonna* Collaborative), Swimming Pool (DoubleCross Press), Flashes (Shearsman Books), Holiday (Shearsman Books), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), from Flashes and snapshot (Sona Books) and Fanimaly (Dusie Kollektiv). She co-edited (with Dana Teen Lomax) Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books) and is collaborating with Marcella Durand on a book about Feminist Avant-garde Poetics. Firestone has work anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Songs, & Stories for Children and Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim. She won the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press’ Robert Creeley Memorial Prize. Firestone is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is also the Director of their Academic Fellows pedagogy program.

How did you first engage with poetry?

When I was younger I would come home from elementary school/middle school and put on my dad’s very large, cushy headphones and sit on the rug near the stereo. I would stay that way for hours listening to all kinds of music, replaying songs and thinking about the lyrics. I loved Janis Joplin, Stevie Wonder, Blondie, Diana Ross, the list goes on. I had an ear for music though I couldn’t play an instrument for the life of me. I could pick up on subtleties, nuances in a musical piece and bring language to express what I thought it was doing. I think this location in sound was meaningful to me, connected to meaning, and was a somewhat natural segue to writing/reading poetry.

Additional influences/introductions to poetry were through teachers in my early education. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Rickenbacker was dynamic, smart, generous. She told my parents I had a talent for writing and that my parents should save my writing, and so they did: stacks and stacks of fiction and poetry on the top shelf of my closet.

Also Ms. Dresser and Mr. Moore, both hard-ass high school English teachers that my peers complained of as being mean and too strict. I sat toward the front of their classes and was tentative because of the rumors that I heard but instead I found them to be committed, passionate, intelligent, and caring deeply about literature. I remember keeping my admiration of them, my joy for their classes, hidden from my peers. Mrs. Dresser was a white woman from Berkeley (or maybe she was getting a graduate degree in Berkeley). She had punkish short, red hair and was a no- nonsense kind of person. She was my first teacher who seemed like a real feminist. And Mr. Moore, an elegant, middle-aged black man, always in a suit, with a deep voice and a face that wouldn’t dare smile. I remember viscerally how I felt in their classes. It would not be over-stating to say I soared (privately), knotting and unknotting the language of poems of Dickinson and Hughes, etc., the feeling of “getting something,” the import of the poem, sonically before semantically, was completely exciting to me, the feeling of almost being there but never really there, intellectually satisfied.