Madeleine Barnes : part one

Madeleine Barnes is a poet, visual artist, and Doctoral Fellow in English Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her debut poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, was recently selected as the winner of Trio House Press’ open reading period, and will be published in May 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Women’s Work, forthcoming from Tolsun Books. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women and non-binary writers and artists. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU in 2016, and she teaches at Brooklyn College.

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

Recently I’ve been writing collaborative poems with former students via email correspondence. We’ll devise an arbitrary goal, such as, “let’s compose a twenty line poem about an astronaut in iambic pentameter.” I’ll send one line, they’ll send the next, and we'll volley lines back and forth until we achieve our goal. This process is profoundly generative, and I love thinking about how a fusion of different voices creates unexpected journeys and dialogues. Collage is another way to begin writing—I like to hunt for unusual phrases in old astronomy magazines and medical texts. These days, I work on my writing alone, but when I lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I was part of the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops. The Madwomen provided an invaluable safe space to me when I needed it most. I couldn’t have written the forthcoming collection without them.

Madeleine Stratford : coda

Every single poet I translated throughout the years has changed the way I think about writing. In a way, both writing and translating poetry is about stretching the limits of the medium, but also the limits of my world. As a poetry translator, I must jump head first into the cracks of my poet’s language, sometimes completely blind. And I am always taking a big risk: that of not being able to crawl back out of a poem’s cracks or, worse still, that of filling the cracks. Alejandra Pizarnik declared once that writing a poem was about perpetually trying to heal a fundamental wound. For me, you have a great poetry translation when the wound and the balm coexist, because the translator penetrated the poet’s language, understood it from the inside, but did not try to explain it: poetry translation is about letting the poem speak for itself. But that process always changes you as a writer, or indeed as a person. You cannot dig that deep into someone else’s intimate relationship with language and remain untouched.

Eleanor Boudreau : part four

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I don’t. 

J.R. Solonche : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

When the fat lady sings. Or when the poem lies back, lights up a cigarette, and blows the smoke in my face. Or when I stick a fork in it.  Or when it cries, “Uncle.” Or when I hear the subdominant, dominant, tonic cadence.

Ilona Martonfi : coda

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

The late Goh Poh Seng, because the first time I heard him read at an open mic event, he said, you are a poet. I attended his Montreal readings, read all his work. We are kindred spirits.

I still google him and listen to him read on his videos. (Goh Poh Seng, a Singaporean dramatist, novelist, doctor and poet, was born in Kuala Lumpur, moved to Canada; Posthumously; Works by Goh Poh Seng.)

Kate Gaskin : part five

How does a poem begin?

With a feeling of lightness, a thread of rhythm, an image. Or with great difficulty after ages of struggling against the misery of a blank Word document. Good poems come from both types of beginnings. Bad poems too.

Koss : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

It never feels finished and, at any stage, it can always fragment and explode into something else, which is why I believe that, while it’s good to go through multiple revisions, it’s important to keep going and produce lots of work—unless of course you want to be Elizabeth Bishop. Cut that thing loose or it might become your albatross.